by Brian Moore
“What ambition?”
“Poetry.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Was it?” his father said. “I wonder.”
“No, no, I’m not a poet. Nobody thinks of me as a poet.”
“You still write poetry, don’t you?”
“I try.”
“You mean,” his father said, “that you’re a poet, but not a recognized poet.”
There was no point in arguing with his father. His father did not understand about poetry.
“As a matter of fact,” his father said, “I was very pleased last night when you showed an interest in our ancestor. Asking for these books, and so on.”
“I didn’t ask for the books, Dad. I asked about family history.”
“But you did mention Mangan the poet,” his father said. “I remember, years ago, you were excited when you found out your hero, James Joyce, thought highly of him.”
“I remember that it didn’t seem at all certain that we’re really related to him.”
“But there must be something in it,” his father said. “I mean, my father wasn’t interested in poetry, he thought it sissy stuff. But somehow, somewhere, his family believed they were the direct descendants of James Clarence Mangan.”
“Based on a rumor in one biography that Mangan had a son. Wasn’t that it? An unproven story.”
“Well, I suppose,” his father said. “Yes, in a way. But I must say, when you showed such a great interest in poetry, I was convinced it was in your blood. I had great hopes once upon a time. I still have, I think . . .” His father did not finish, but finished his drink instead.
“Hopes that what? That I’d follow in his footsteps, and die of malnutrition, penniless, a drunkard and a drug addict?”
“Now, hold on,” his father said. “Wasn’t it your hero, Joyce, who said that Mangan’s addiction to drink and drugs, his dying of neglect, malnutrition, and so on—that that was the sort of life a true artist might be expected to live?”
“I don’t agree. I think a life like that obscures the work. The poète maudit is remembered for his drugs, horrors, escapades—for his life itself.”
“Well, when I visited Ireland,” his father said, “I found the opposite. James ****Clarencé Mangan’s poems are in all the schoolbooks. And they’re still admired. Listen!” His father held up his hand, and for a moment Mangan thought he was going to recite. But instead he rose and looked through the kitchen window. A car could be heard coming up the back road. “Margrethe,” his father said happily, forgetting the discussion, going out of the back door into the cold to open the car door for her. Watching them through the window, seeing Margrethe pull back her yellow parka hood to receive his father’s kiss, Mangan felt a flush of embarrassment. How could he expect his father, boisterously kissing his new bride, to take seriously these self-centered fears by his son of a former marriage, fears that must seem as foolish to his father as the long-ago terrors of that little boy who had to be carried piggyback across the lawn because of nonexistent snakes?
“Well, hello, Jamie!” Margrethe’s voice suddenly brightened the little kitchen. He received her usual warm embrace and a cold-cheeked kiss. “Is this supper? What are we having?”
“Pork chops and peas,” his father said. “Everything’s under control. How was the skiing?”
“Fantastic. But we had to wait so long for the lift. It was worth it, though.”
“Good. I must try to get up there tomorrow,” his father said. “Now, let’s clear these books off. Jamie, will you take them into the living room?”
He picked up the wooden box and went in with it, switching on the lamp by the window. He took from the box the family Bible, fingering its scuffed covers, remembering how it used to sit on the top shelf of his father’s study. In the flyleaf, a column of lives. He sat in the pool of lamplight, the page open on his knee. The ink had faded to sepia tone on the first entry. A marriage. Patrick James Mangan, to Kathleen Driscoll, 1862. Their children’s birth-dates followed, then the eldest son’s marriage, then the children of that issue. The last entry must have been made by Mangan’s grandfather. It recorded his father’s birth date: James Patrick Mangan, 8 August 1917. The end of the line? Why didn’t my father record my birth?
He raised his head to ask the question, but his father and Margrethe had left the kitchen and were laying the table in the dining-room alcove. He put the Bible back in the box and picked up an old photograph album, a book he did not remember ever seeing before. The first half of the album consisted of snapshots, many in sepia tones, positioned on the album’s pages by black passe-partout triangles. Some were captioned in a tiny, neat script. Books of photographs had always interested him, and he at once settled himself in his chair, turning the first pages. But, as he did, a number of loose photographs slid out from the back of the book and fell on the living-room floor. Some were in frames. He picked them up, shuffling them together. Ancient tintypes, calotypes, and even daguerreotypes, they were too heavy to be affixed in the book itself. One by one, as though dealing cards, he played them on the opened pages of the album. Against backgrounds of stretched white sheets, or painted canvas, men, women, and children stared at the camera, statue-still, as the unseen photographer, head ostriched under his cloth, prepared to loose his magnesium explosion. Often, the name and address of the photographic studio, scrolled in elaborate curlicues, adorned the bottoms of the photographs, and as Mangan read off the names of Irish cities—Galway, Cork—it came to him that these long-ago kin of his were members of the first generation in human history to see themselves plain, not in a lake’s reflection or in the ephemeral shimmer of a looking glass, or distorted by the talents or whim of a portrait painter’s brush, but fixed forever as they were in life, awkward in ill-fitting new clothes bought or made for those great occasions of first communions, confirmations, weddings, ordinations. He paused to look at a first-communion portrait of a boy in a white sailor suit with white patent-leather boots, holding in his hand a white prayer book. He turned the portrait over. There was no name on the back. He let it fall on the pages of the album and then saw the next photograph in the deck, a portrait in a scrolled brass frame preserved under glass, a small, shimmering, mirror-bright picture on silver-coated copperplate. It measured about three inches by four and showed a man facing the camera, a head-and-shoulders portrait taken against a plain background. The man wore a silk cravat, a white shirt, and a dark cape tied loosely about his neck by two broad tapes. His longish hair fell to his shoulders and his slight uncertain smile revealed a missing upper tooth. What made Mangan stare as though transfixed by a vision was that the face in the photograph was his own. He turned the daguerreotype over. On the back of the frame, written in a sloping looped script in the top righthand corner, was the notation: (J.M. 1847?)
“Dad?” Mangan said. He felt he could barely trust himself to speak.
His father had come back into the kitchen with Margrethe. “I think I have a little cooking brandy on the lower shelf of the cupboard,” Margrethe was saying.
“If not, we can always use whiskey,” his father said.
“Dad, come and look at this.”
His father turned and walked into the living room. Mangan held out the photograph. His father looked at it, then bent forward into a pool of lamplight and said in a half whisper, “Margrethe, come and see this.”
She came and bent over, looking with him. “It’s Jamie!”
Mangan’s father held the old photograph up near his son’s face. “My God. Whoever this was, he’s certainly related to you, Jamie.”
“Look at the back.”
“J.M. 1847. Funny. I don’t remember seeing this before. Was it in that album?”
“Yes, in this loose pile at the back. What year did Mangan die?”
His father handed back the photograph and went to the box of books. He picked up one of the volumes and opened it. “Let’s see. There’s a chronology here someplace. Yes. 1849. He was born in 1803.”
>
“So this could be him?”
“It could be. Mangan would have been forty-four in 1847.”
“The only thing is, his name was James Clarence Mangan.”
“No, no,” his father said. “Clarence wasn’t a baptismal name. He adopted it as a nom de plume. He used to sign some of his early pieces just ‘Clarence.’”
“God,” Mangan said. “Imagine if it is.”
“Wait.” His father rummaged in the box again. “There are some frontispieces. Drawings. I don’t think there was ever any photograph of him.”
His father opened the books and laid them side by side, four frontispieces in all. One was a pencil drawing, showing the head of the poet, his hair long and thinning, his eyes closed. It was attributed as a deathbed sketch. Another was a photograph of a medallion profile. There was also a small volume whose frontispiece was a silhouette of Mangan in 1822, when he would have been nineteen years old. The third book contained a small sketch of an eccentric figure perusing a book at a bookstall. This figure wore a high conical hat like a witch’s headgear. A short cape covered his jacket, and beneath the cape a large umbrella was tucked under his arm like a set of bagpipes. The last frontispiece was an amateurish drawing listed as being from the Freeman’s Journal, a periodical of the day. All these drawings placed side by side differed from each other as would various police artists’ renderings of a criminal suspect. On the evidence of the drawings alone, Mangan could see that he bore a faint resemblance to the dead poet. The photograph was something entirely different. It was his face. It could be no other.
“Funny that I didn’t notice that photo before now,” his father said, picking up one of the books. “Of course, in the days when I was looking into this stuff, Jamie was still a baby. Now, take these two likenesses. The deathbed sketch by—who is it?—Sir Frederick William Burton. And this medallion by George Millbourne. I’d say both of them show some resemblance to you. What do you think, Margrethe?”
“The medallion,” Margrethe said and laughed. “That’s Jamie’s nose, all right.”
“Is my nose really that big?”
“Come to think of it,” his father said, “this would make a nice little page 3 local feature: descendant’s astonishing likeness to dead poet. All we have to do is photograph you against a plain backdrop in exactly the same pose. The likeness is uncanny.”
“Pat! Your pork chops!” Margrethe cried.
His father turned and ran into the kitchen, Margrethe following. Mangan sat down again, looking at the photograph, and then as on an inspiration began to hunt through the pages of the larger of the two biographies, searching for a physical description of the poet. His father and Margrethe were busy with the last stages of preparation of the meal. They called out to ask if he wanted another drink, but he did not answer. A giddy excitement filled him; he forgot himself, forgot Beatrice, was caught up in a search whose object he did not understand. Even when the meal was ready and the dishes were being brought into the diningroom alcove, he did not abandon his book.
“Come on, Jamie,” his father said. “Leave that for a while. We’re going to have our New Year’s dinner.”
“Did you find anything?” Margrethe asked.
He turned back the pages of the book. “In 1849, in the year of his death, a friend of Mangan’s—a Father Meehan—wrote that Mangan was about five feet seven inches tall, slightly stooped, with a beautifully shaped head. Another description mentions his very bright blue eyes.”
“Well, you’re taller than that,” Margrethe said. “But you certainly have the bright blue eyes.”
“Dinner is served,” his father reminded them.
“It also mentions his pale and intellectual face. And his silver-white locks.”
”My hair will be silver-white before I get to eat,” his father said.
“Okay. Coming. But listen to this. ‘The dress of this spectral-looking man was singularly remarkable, taken down at hazard from some old clothes shop, a baggy pantaloon, a short coat, closely buttoned, a blue cloth cloak still shorter. The hat was in keeping with this habiliment, broad-leaved and steeple-shaped—’”
“Jamie!” his father said.
“Sorry.” Unwillingly, he put the book aside and went to join them. His father poured wine and, as they sat down to table, held up his glass in toast. “Well, here’s to the New Year and to all of us.”
“Happy New Year, Pat,” Margrethe said, raising her glass. “And a happy New Year to you, Jamie. What a strange feeling it must be for you to find your—what’s the word, I forget—it’s Vorfahr in German.”
“Ancestor,” Mangan said. “Although, in this case, maybe Doppelgänger is a better word.”
His father clinked glasses, then erupted in a sneeze of laughter. “And there I was ten minutes ago saying I once had hopes you’d be a poet like James Clarence. Thank God, you only look like him.”
“I don’t know. Maybe, after all, I’d be glad to change places with him. I suppose, in his way, he did something with his life.”
“What are we going to do with this fellow?” his father said to Margrethe. “He’s taking a very, very gloomy view of things these days. He’ll get over it, won’t he?”
“Of course,” Margrethe said, smiling. “Of course he will. That photo is amazing, though. What was he, Jamie? Your great-great-grandfather?”
“Yes. Great-great.”
“I don’t really know anything about your family,” Margrethe said. “Except that they come from Ireland. Pat never told me anything. I wonder why.”
“You never asked me,” his father said.
“Well, tell us now,” Mangan said.
“Come on. Why, it would only bore Margrethe. Let’s just enjoy this wine. It’s a Corton, in case you haven’t noticed. And we have two bottles.”
“It won’t bore me,” Margrethe said. “Please, Pat.”
“Oh, I suppose in that case,” his father said, “why not?” He smiled and sipped his wine. “Actually, we’re pretenders to the Mangan crown. I mean, the relative Jamie is interested in, James Clarence Mangan, may not be our relative at all. We have no real proof that we’re related. Most of the accounts of Mangan’s life state quite definitely that he never married. He was one of four children, three boys and a girl, and according to all of his biographers except one—who I’ll come to later—he and his younger brother, William, were bachelors and lived together as drunks and derelicts. So the older brother, John, was the only one to carry on the line. But one biographer—a Father Drinan—insists that Mangan married a widow from a place called Skib-bereen in West Cork. She was on a trip to Dublin around 1839 when she met him, and they were married, Father Drinan says, in 1841, and a son was born in that same year. But, apparently, Mangan’s drinking and opium taking drove them apart and the widow left him and took the child back to Skibbereen, where she owned two shops. Now what excited me was a family Bible which I found together with Mangan’s poems and the Drinan biography and some correspondence from a Father Drinan with the Trinity College Library in Dublin, trying to trace our connection to Mangan the poet. It seems he’d traced back as far as a Patrick James Mangan born in 1841 in Dublin, whom Father Drinan thought to be the son of the poet himself. That Patrick James Mangan was taken by his mother to a village called Drishane in West Cork.”
“And you went there yourself once?” Mangan asked.
“Yes. I wrote to Drishane and found there were Mangans still living there. And when your mother and I visited Ireland about fifteen years ago, we got up one morning and drove there from Cork, but your mother came down with food poisoning on the way and we had to turn around and go back without ever meeting those relatives. If they were relatives. To this day, I don’t really know if I’m a great-grandson of the poet or not.” His father smiled, picked up the wine bottle, and in dumb show asked permission to refill their glasses.
“So Drishane’s where Grandfather came from?”
“No. Your grandfather was brought up in Cork and emigrate
d when he was seventeen.”
“Six years younger than I was when I emigrated here from Denmark with my parents,” Margrethe said. “I was twenty-three.”
“With your hair still in pigtails,” his father said fondly. “I wish I could have seen you then. That was when you went to work at Eaton’s, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Margrethe said, and laughed. “My first job was at a counter, selling leg warmers.”
“Pigtails and leg warmers,” his father said, smiling. “When was it I met you? It was about four years after that, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Margrethe said. She turned to Mangan. “I was doing publicity for Air Canada. Your father was in Quebec City on a press junket.” She laughed and pointed to Mangan’s father. “He asked me to go to a dance.”
“Which brings me back to family history,” his father said. ”My father landed in Quebec, seventeen years old, and went on to Toronto, where he got a job as a clerk in the Canadian Pacific Railway and came rapidly up in the world. He was moved to the head office in Montreal and ended up as assistant comptroller of the whole CPR system. Pretty good for a first-generation Irish immigrant.”
“And he had two children, right?” Margrethe said. “You and your brother.”
“Yes, Jack and I,” his father said. He raised his glass and looked at the color of the wine. “Jack never married and I had Jamie. Jamie is the last of our line. Well, of course, not yet. You’ll remarry, won’t you, Jamie?”
“Never mind Jamie,” Margrethe said to his father. “What about us? Did you forget?”
His father smiled, at once complicit and embarrassed. “Well, anyway. Enough history. I’ll make the Cherries Jubilee.” He rose, took the second wine bottle from the dresser, filled their glasses, then put the bottle on the table. “Let me help you,” Margrethe said.
“All right, darling,” his father said. “Have some more wine, Jamie.”
He watched as his father and Margrethe went into the kitchen, their voices suddenly dropping to whispers. Were they talking about having a baby? Beatrice and I, the stillborn son I never saw. Fetus M., his only name.