“He was idealistic,” one of them says. “He thought the world was his oyster.”
•
On the bulletin board in my fifth-grade classroom, Sister Bernetta has tacked up a postcard she received from another nun who went to visit Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
On the card is an image of a reliquary, an elaborate, silver, coffin-like box containing the leg bone of Saint Vincent of Saragossa. The yellowing bone can be seen through a glass window, lying on a red velvet pillow.
•
When I leave Inisheer very early in the morning to visit the other two islands, turf fires burn along the shore. We lift sail in a good breeze just as the sun arrives, the gray overcast weather utterly gone. I can see in every direction. The horizon to the west is endless, without a definite demarcation between sea and sky, and the mainland to the east, cliffs and lowlands, beach and rocks.
We soon dock at Inishmaan, which we tour on foot, a small group of us led by a tall, long-limbed Galway man named Michael Slattery, who asks us to call him Mick. We pass limestone cottages issuing smoke, fragrant of both earth and kelp. Curious children watch us from doorways. Indolent cows graze in fields congested with wildflowers.
Mick tells us that the three islands have four or five dark-haired families said to be descended from seals, and that less than a decade before, the local priest drove a witch from these shores.
After viewing gravestones defaced by weather, druid altars, and prehistoric forts overgrown with moss and lichen, we go on to the big island. Walking along roadways in the brightness, I search for signs of Laura, but she is nowhere to be seen. Mick remarks that the island is curiously empty of tourists for such a fine day.
I take out my map of Ireland and draw a tiny dot on the north point of the northernmost Aran Island. This is where I am in the world right now, ocean all around me. I look toward Galway Bay to the east, its circle of water washing into the Atlantic, where my grandfather and uncle Michael set sail for America.
•
It is my turn to pay my respects at my father’s coffin. I am holding an envelope with poems inside, written on loose-leaf paper, five or six rambling pages. Much of it feels more like stammering than poetry. I have borrowed one line from “The Flea”: Our two bloods, yours and mine, mingled be.
My father does not look like himself. I recognize part of his forehead and one of his temples, his hair, his ears, his hands. It infuriates me that the mortician, or whoever has put my father’s face back together, has gotten it so wrong. The nose especially outrages me. It is pointed, not my father’s Irish nose at all.
My mother whispers that I should put the envelope into his pocket. The fabric of his suit jacket sends a numb vibration through my fingertips as I lift it. My hand hesitates against his chest. I don’t want to leave. I focus on my father’s temple, which looks unaltered. “Can I kiss him?” I ask my mother. She nods. Even with a quick brush of my lips, I can feel the tremendous cold weight of his dead body.
•
This does not feel like a dream. I am waiting for my father at a scheduled meeting place that is neither inside nor outside. He has, somehow, arranged our meeting. A lot of people are around and a train arrives and my father gets off it, excited and clearly relieved to see me. We sit together at a long sort of cafeteria-style table. He is shaking, anxious, but seems hopeful that I can help him.
“Where do I go now?” he asks, leaning forward across the table, almost smiling.
“You are dead,” I say.
“Yeah, I know,” he says though he seems uncertain. “But I’m lost. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.”
“I don’t know, Dad,” I reply.
He presses me, telling me that if I try, I will have the answer, but I don’t. He panics. He gets up and heads for an elevator full of people. I run after him and just as the doors are closing, he says, “Reggie, I’m going to hell.”
•
I discover that I can draw on the air with the Fourth of July sparkler that Dad lights and hands to me. The circle I draw on the air is green. Dad calls it phosphorescence. I write my name in script, but by the time I’ve written the last letter, the first one has faded to white and then dissolved. Next I write Dad, and the entire word floats there a moment in green before going white and disappearing.
•
After the funeral I sit on my bed sewing, repairing a tear in one of my blouses. For a moment the air gets warmer, then collapses into a shock of cold that smells like snow or rain and something like rotting apples. I’m afraid to look up, so I stare at the needle poised between my thumb and forefinger. A fine, soft aura of white falls over my lap and hands, as if there is another light source in the room. I hear a soft, hoarse noise like something rustling, very dry cloth, tulle or net, dragging on wood. This is my father breathing.
I hang my head and start to cry, the tears so hot on my face they burn. He wants something from me. I feel him pulling at me. I say nothing, just weep. But he doesn’t go.
•
I am nearing Dun Aengus, climbing to the promontory of the ancient monument, magnificent and barbaric, three concentric massive stone walls built on a precipice and curved to form and protect a great system of a fortress.
“We know from bardic writings that centuries before the birth of Christ, a civilization similar to Homer’s thrived here and remained up until the coming of Saint Patrick,” Mick says, then goes on to explain that the fortress’s placement on the high ground of the island allows for an ultimate view all around.
Ditches, palisades, and borders of sharp, upturned rocks jut in all directions, like a wall of jagged stone soldiers that made passage impossible to Viking marauders.
We wander through a crude, narrow stone doorway into what was once a city. Some walls are in ruins, while others stand mighty, many of them fifteen or twenty feet thick. On the easterly side, the circular wall stops at the edge of a cliff that descends hundreds of feet to the ocean.
Mick advises us to lie on our stomachs, to look straight down. Even doing this, I am overcome with vertigo, and have to close my eyes and belly-creep backward.
As we begin our descent, he points out other small forts and raths along the way that he says are older still than Dun Aengus, built by the mysterious people known as the Tuatha de Danaan, “tribes of the goddess Danu,” who conquered Ireland with magic. But the druids were too powerful for them and the Tuatha de Danaan fled and took refuge in these raths and forts, which are now called fairy mounds.
“There are people these days who romanticize the pagan druids,” Mick adds. “But they weren’t harmless tree worshipers, as is popularly believed. They performed human sacrifices.”
Just as he begins to lead us away, he turns and points westerly and slightly north into the Atlantic. “That, it is said, is where Tír na nÓg lies.”
•
I persuade my mother and sisters to go with me to the movies to see the new version of The Great Gatsby, with Mia Farrow and Robert Redford. Neither my sisters nor I have read the book. Our mother has, but long ago, and she has forgotten that there is a suicide at the end, or maybe she just doesn’t expect it to be so graphically depicted in the film, the man putting the gun into his mouth. After we get home, Tracy retreats to her room, and Mom and Sheila sit together on the couch, neither speaking, but clinging to each other. I apologize for having suggested the movie. “You love Robert Redford,” I say to my mother. “I just wanted all of us to go to a movie.”
Sheila joins Mom in her room that night to watch old movies on television and even sleep there. The two of them curl up against each other, not like mother and child, but like two children.
•
In our living room on Park Hill, my father, young, dark-haired, and smiling, recites poems and everyone listens. The second he stops, thunder sounds. People cheer. A moment later, there’s a downpour.
“Vincent!” a man cries. “You brought the rain!”
“God love you,” says a sweating wom
an who is fanning herself with a magazine.
“God love you, Vincent,” another woman echoes.
•
I am staring at the horizon when Mick calls out to me from a distance. They all stand there in a little group, waiting on me. I follow them to the shore, where we get onto a steamer, which speeds, skipping the water, toward Galway Bay. I stand in the full blast of the wind and sun, still looking to the west.
I tell myself that after getting to Galway, I will take a bus back to Dublin. But I stop awhile on the pier, looking for the rocks my grandfather and uncle Michael had been standing on when the photograph was taken. So much time has passed. Those rocks have probably long since shifted or fallen into the water. And I realize now that the old photograph was so insubstantial, the picture itself a ghost, two pale, sepia figures partially erased in a blitz of white light.
•
I buy my ticket and there is an hour yet before I can board so I walk through a maze of nearby streets.
Galway is different from any other Irish town I’ve been to. There is a Spanish influence to the architecture, many of the bookshops and cafés colorfully painted, with lanterns and courtyards and arched doorways, and some of the shops with the word Spain or Spanish in the name.
In a bookstore window there is a portrait of Yeats. It pains me again that I cannot get to Yeats country, as if I have broken a promise to my father.
As I pass the open door of a pub, a tin whistle plays a mournful melody, and I stop to listen. When the last note ends, a flood of fast-paced, merry music, fiddle and bodhran and flute, takes over the air. A man sings in a high-pitched, nasal voice:
In the first of me downfall I put out the door,
And I straight made me way on for Carrick-on-Suir.
Radley fall da diddle ai,
Radley fall da diddle ai-o.
•
“Do you think . . . is it my fault . . . what happened to your father?”
My heart throbs in my throat. I can’t get rid of the image of my mother scratching my father’s face with every ounce of energy in her body, tearing four deep cuts into each cheek. I shake all over. I want to say, Yes. It’s your fault.
With great effort, I say, “No.”
•
I go to Eyre Square and sit on a bench in view of the public clock to keep track of the time so I won’t miss the bus, but soon find out that it is delayed another hour. In a little restaurant called the Port of Spain, I sit at a table near an open French door. A waitress, around my age, with black, spiky hair, wearing a T-shirt with the phases of the moon on it, takes my order: a glass of Harp Lager and a package of peanuts. I chug most of the beer in one long swig, then ask her if my backpack will be safe where I’ve left it if I go to the bathroom. She says she’ll keep an eye on it.
As I am coming back, I stop to study a dartboard with a familiar historical face on it, one dart stuck into a mole on the right side of the man’s mouth, hundreds of tiny dart punctures all over his face.
I realize who it is.
“Can I throw a dart at him?” I ask the waitress, who is standing near the bar. “Do I have to pay for it?”
“Have a throw,” she says. “On the house.”
Remembering Denis’s instructions, I focus the dart. “A pox on you, Oliver Cromwell,” I cry as I throw it and it sticks hard in his chin.
“Damn it,” I say. “I was going for his eye.”
She laughs. “He’s made mincemeat of so often, we have to get replacements every few weeks.”
“Good,” I say.
I go back to my table to finish my lager and peanuts and the waitress comes with a full pint glass of Harp. “This is on the house,” she says. “For knowing your Irish history. You’d be surprised how many Yanks come over here and have no idea who Oliver Cromwell was.”
“Thank you so much,” I say.
“Not at all,” she says. “No manager on duty tonight. While the cat’s away . . .” She winks at me.
•
On the bus to Dublin I find the fifty-pound note folded up and zipped into a side pocket in my jacket and have a vague memory of putting it there while I was still in Doolin. But what kind of a fugue state have I been in that I couldn’t remember this? I decide that I will get off the bus. I can easily go back to Galway, then find my way to Sligo. But when the bus stops, I am overcome with inertia, leaning hard against the window and staring out. My body refuses to budge.
I half close my eyes. I want to sleep, to temporarily disappear. I cannot fathom this act of sabotage I am committing against myself.
I am destined, over and over, to keep losing my father.
•
Dad’s driving, I’m riding shotgun, and Jerry’s in the backseat, when “Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin comes on the car radio.
“Yay!” I say.
“Turn it louder, Reg!” Jerry says.
I reach over and turn up the volume. When Robert Plant screeches a loud, undulating “Lo-o-o-o-o-o-ve!” over guitar distortions, Dad says, “Christ!” and turns it down.
“Dad!” I exclaim.
“That’s the tune the old cow died of,” he mutters.
I pretend I’m still mad, but have to turn my face away from him so he won’t see that I’m holding back a laugh.
•
Mom lights cigarettes, smokes them for a little while, then leaves them on counters or shelves. I find them on the window ledges, sometimes dangerously close to a curtain, funnels of ash that leave deep burns on the wood or the tile.
In the living room she faces the piano and stares. Everything I say to her has to be repeated five, six, seven times. It is like shouting down a tunnel. It takes time and energy to reach her and even then when she turns to me, she can’t concentrate enough to answer.
I focus on titles on the bookshelf: The Ox-Bow Incident, Ivanhoe, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
We sit in silence, she in her brown chair facing the wall above the piano, me on the couch, hunched forward in an uneasy suspense.
Jude the Obscure. Little Dorrit.
She turns in my direction and says, “My father . . . they say his death was a car accident, but I think he drove deliberately off the road.”
I know he died when she was fifteen. I know he drank.
My eyes stop on a thick, worn textbook from high school English, a collection of Greek dramas. I remember a title: The Fall of the House of Atreus.
I get up and go out into the front yard to breathe. The poplars encircling our house move back and forth in the wind. They shudder in unison like a Greek chorus.
•
In one of Blake’s etchings, God sits with a man on a cloud and points down at a horrific monster standing on the earth below. “Behold now Behemoth,” God says, “which I made with thee.”
•
My father is dead and my mother is in the hospital. My sisters and I keep the house lit at night, the windows and doors open. We turn the stereo on loud. Over and over again we play “Baba O’Riley” by the Who, singing the repeated chorus about teenage wasteland, and each time Roger Daltrey does the wild, uninhibited, drawn-out scream, we all do it with him, as if to invite one of the neighbors to come see what’s going on. We want to upset someone. We want them to complain.
But no one comes.
None of us can sleep. The trees in the yard are in their late summer fullness, tumultuous and rushing, the lawn neglected, green and long as meadow grass. We get in the car barefoot at 1:00 AM to go for a ride.
Few cars are on the road at this hour. In the dark, we drive up Galisteo, an old, narrow Santa Fe street lined with ancient cottonwood trees, the radio blasting “Stairway to Heaven.” We sing it with elation, the wind through the open car windows blowing our hair.
We decide on an impulse to sneak into the hospital. It is full of shadows and silence, broken by stations of light. We walk through, passing each checkpoint undetected. A guard disappears into a back room or an administrator’s head turns as a phone rings.
We reach the elevator and go to the third floor, where a trio of matronly nurses stand, conferring with one another like the Three Fates. They speak in half voices right in front of us, yet we pass them unseen as if something mystical propels us forward. Mom’s door is ajar, her dark room lit only by the fluorescence from the hallway. We surround her bed.
“Mom,” I whisper and she opens her eyes, startled out of a drugged sleep.
“We love you, Mom, we love you,” Tracy and Sheila chime in.
The three of us repeat the chant again and again, hugging her, looking into her face. “We love you. We love you.”
“I love you,” comes her slow voice, a register deeper than usual. She looks as if she thinks she might be dreaming this.
In the doorway, the Third Fate, Atropos, she who cuts the thread of life, appears. “What are you doing here at this hour? You’ve got to leave.”
“She’s our mother,” I say.
An anguished expression comes over the big woman’s face as she insists again that we leave. “We love you, Mom. We love you.” She nods, at a loss. We are ushered out. The clock says twenty-five minutes after one. We drive home without any giddy moments. We are tired. There are tears.
PART FIVE
Did you see County Clare?” the woman in the shop on Dawson Street asks. “Did you see the Cliffs of Moher?” She comes out from behind the counter and stands before me, a short energetic creature with a wide, freckled forehead. The morning before I left for the West, I stopped here to buy ten Silk Cut cigarettes and a Cadbury bar.
“Yes! So beautiful!”
“Ahhhh!” she says and laces her fingers together, her eyes a riot of light behind her glasses. “I miss it!”
I tell her all the places I went and show her postcards I have in my purse.
Before I leave she takes a chocolate-covered biscuit filled with jam from a cake dish on the counter, wraps it in a small piece of wax paper, and hands it to me.
“Take it, love! Take it!”
•
Willing to overlook her disapproval of my backpack, Theresa lets me stay at Fatima House at a reduced rate. While I do not get the full Irish breakfast that the regular guests get, she gives me tea and toast every morning in the drafty breakfast room.
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