I'll Love You Tomorrow

by Welby Thomas Cox, Jr.

  St. Louis Bertrand was a magnificent church, built on the European scale but just slightly smaller than a cathedral. It was nonetheless a very spiritual place where the faithful were treated each Sunday and holy days of obligation to the beauty of the place: the organ; the choir; the massive nature of the statues of the Blessed Virgin, Jesus Christ, St. Francis and others; the spectacular presentation of the mass and the respect shown by all in attendance.

  But these were Dominicans…The Order of Preachers and their teachings could be spicy…and at times, quite political. The priest would not hesitate to chastise the faithful on the issue of birth control, especially the evils of abortion and those who murder children. They spoke out against politicians as well, at election time to remind the members to vote and who to vote for.

  Most often their wishes were fulfilled because these were old time Catholics who did not question the validity of the priest or the right of the church to call it as they saw it.

  Historical Review

  The Romans in the first century of the Christian era, did give much of this place a transient cohesion. From Istanbul in the east to Caernarvon in the west they imposed a common system, accustoming their subjects everywhere to the same laws and customs, enabling them for the first time to travel safely here and there, and perhaps really first bringing into existence the concept of such an entity as Europe. For a few generations my own forebears, peering painted out of the druidical forests in the general direction of Italy, might just as felt themselves members of some wider commonwealth-if only if because it was to Rome, if the need arose, that their more recalcitrant leaders were dragged off in chains.

  When the legions withdrew, and Europe fell apart again, this shaky sense of identity was not exactly lost, but was kept in abeyance. The nation-state was born, and for hundreds of years the kingdoms, principalities and republics of Europe fought each other for supremacy or survival, inflamed by dynastic jealousies, or border disputes, or the grievance of minorities, or water rights, or simply relative grandeurs. As the American poet Ogden Nash scoffed:

  and so it goes for ages and acorns,

  between these neighboring Europeans.

  A telling memorial to these tragic futilities is the runic inscription carved on the flank of a stone lion at Venice. It records the participation of mercenary soldiers from Scandinavia, at one extremity of Europe, at the behest of the Byzantine Emperor of Constantinople, at another, in a punitive expedition to Greece. The lion, itself brought to Venice as war booty from the Piraeus, looks rather sheepish to be bearing this message of wasted belligerence, and indeed nothing could be much sillier than the history of Europe between the fall of the Rome and the end of the Cold War. Some twenty-eight separate sovereignties still govern this corner of the world: it is only now-and perhaps only briefly now-that we are once abler to contemplate it as a putative unity, and to view the whole of it from the skies above, without being shot down by missiles.

  Another poignant illustration of European fatuity is provided by Vienna, the capital of Austria. Indisputably one of the world’s supreme cities, haunted by the shades of its celebrated citizens and majestic with official buildings, today Vienna is political absurdity. A quarter of all the Austrians live within the city limits, and the writ of those mighty offices of State, portentous beneath their emblems of old consequence, in fact runs hardly more than a couple hundred miles in any direction.

  This is a very European phenomenon. It arises in Vienna because this was once the capital of a much wider dominion-nothing less than the great Empire of the Habsburgs, which ruled half of Europe. In those days Vienna’s talent for pomp, its instinct for hierarchy, for millions of Austrians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs and Romanians and to countless citizens it seemed the center of all things. The history that has shriveled it into impotence has had similar effects all over Europe, causing cities, provinces, kingdoms, and republics to rise and fall and sometimes to rise again, and often throwing whole generations confusingly out of one nationality into another.

  The continent is entangled in a web of frontiers. Some of its borders are geographically obvious: The Rhine is one, the English Channel is another, the Danube conveniently separates Bulgaria and Romania, the Pyrenees properly divide Spain from France, the summit of the Matterhorn is as good a place as anywhere to draw a line between Italy and Switzerland. More often, though, the logic of the frontiers is blurred, and queer anomalies abound. The Channel Islands, close to the coast of France, are British. Rhodes, near the coast of Turkey, is Greek. Gibraltar, which forms the southern tip of Spain, owes its allegiance to the Queen of England, while Llivia, within the French region of Roussillon, is subject to the king of Spain. Some states contain populations speaking several languages-in France alone eight are spoken. Some populations have been repeatedly tossed back and forth between different states. Preposterous corridors have been decreed to link detached possessions of the same sovereignty, and a place like Trieste has been so confused by the exchanges of history that a stranger arriving there uninformed could hardly guess what country he was in. On the map the frontiers of Europe often look like the meandering doodles of statesmen, idling away the hours of a conference, and perhaps that is what they sometimes are.

  Yet with frontiers, however artificial, goes patriotism. Patriotism has been at once the glory and the disgrace of Europe, and you feel its ambiguous energy wherever you go. It is not an innocuous pride in the beauty of the countryside, the success of an economic system, the glory of a history, the splendor of a literature. More often it is the stirring but irrational devotion to the state-a particular patch of territory, enclosed within man made limits and taught to think of itself as different from all others. Part of the thrill of Europe is its effulgence of nationalistic display. It is hard not to feel a frisson of Frenches, for instance, if you should ever stride down the Champs-Elysees in Paris on a public holiday, when the traffic is cleared, the flags are flying, and you can march towards the Arc de Triomphe feeling like de Gaulle himself. But it is an illicit thrill, for more than anything else the chauvinist love of country has brought this continent into disrepute, besides slaughtering its people by the millions and cruelly delaying its fulfillment.

  Every degree of State flourishes in Europe, and demands its own allegiance. In and among the great kingdoms and republics are many semi-states hardly less proud of their dignities. Liechtenstein and Monaco, Andorra and San Marino and the Vatican are all States of a kind, with their own stamps and currencies, their own laws and their own ceremonial figureheads- a Prince, a Grand Duke, a pair of State Presidents or a Pope. And far fiercer still can be patriotism among those nations of Europe that are not states at all, but have long forcibly subsumed into greater political entities. Hardly a week goes by, even in the 1990’s, without the explosion of a bomb among the Basques, an ethnic fracas in Yugoslavia, the burning of an English –owned cottage by the Welsh or some act of nationalist vendetta in Corsica. These passionate struggles are like after-quakes, as it were, to the terrible seismic convulsions that created modern Europe.

  Europe has been a magnate and, an epitome. It has drawn multitudes of pilgrims to its shrines, and not a few predators to its riches. Neolithic’s apart, all its original inhabitants come originally from somewhere else, and even within historic times alien peoples have repeatedly threatened to master it. In the thirteenth century the Mongols, storming out of the Asian heartlands, advanced far into Poland and Hungary and seemed likely for a time to swarm across the entire continent. In the fifteenth century the Muslim Turks seized the Byzantine capital of Constantinople and established an Islamic foothold in Western Europe which still survives. And in the eighth century, the Arabs and Berbers had come out of Africa to create, in one corner of Europe, an historic allegory.

  The Muslim Moors ruled much of Spain for seven centuries, and would perhaps have ruled France too if they had not been defeated in 732 AD, near Poitiers, in one of the crucial battles of all history. By the end of the fifteenth c
entury they were out of Spain, out of Europe altogether, but they left behind tantalizing relics of the synthesis they had achieved during their long presence. It is an ironic truth that of all the cultures of Europe, the forcibly imposed culture of the alien Moors, blended so anomalously with the Spanish genius, remains in the historical memory the most suggestively serene-rich in science and philosophies, full of poetry and delight, expressing itself in gardens and golden buildings that remain today, absorbed into the harsher beauties of Christian Spain, poignant images of the Golden Age. Perhaps it never really was one, but still I never travel among these enchanted memorials without imagining what Europe might have been, if it had been less haughty in its generations, and more relaxed.

  For there is no pretending that serenity has been a European characteristic. This is a place of conflict. There are few critics in the continent that have not, at one time or the other, been razed, looted, fought over or bombed; and deep in the collective unconscious of Europe is a skeptical distrust of destiny.

  The rivalries and ambitions of Europe have embroiled the whole world. An obscure assassin kills an Austrian aristocrat in a small town in the Balkans, and within a couple of years men are slaughtering each other in East Africa, in Iraq or in the Indian Ocean. A demagogue comes to power in Germany, and twelve years later the nuclear bomb falls on Japan. The plagues of Europe become the curses of humanity, and in our own time Europe’s mass murder of its Jews has come to seem a paradigm of suffering itself. The continent has more often had cause to weep than to celebrate, and the lovely landscapes that are spread through the picturesque mountains and valleys are soaked in blood and tears.

  Yet the Europeans long thought themselves the arbiters of right and wrong, with license to command all lesser breeds. In the middle ages the pope had no qualms about dividing the unexplored world between Spain and Portugal. A century ago Europe thought it perfectly proper to seize huge slabs of other continents, declaring its inhabitants subject to itself, and exploiting their resources for its own aggrandizement. A vast aggressive energy emanated from Europe for a thousand years and more, and at one time or another European Powers ruled the entire African continent, the whole of India, all the Americas and everything there was in Australia.

  ********************

  Easter Sunday in 1916 fell on April 23, which is the feast-day of St. George, England’s patron saint, and the birthday of William Shakespeare, England’s national poet. These events did not deter the Irish from going to Mass to celebrate the risen Christ.

  There were clouds in the lives of some Dubliners, however. The war against Germany had killed or threatened to kill, sons and husbands who had enlisted in the British army. At home, two unofficial armies-the Irish Volunteers, a patriotic nationalist formation with 16,000 men, and the tiny Irish Citizens Army, at 200-strong but very militant offshoot of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union-were known to be stirring up trouble in the capital in the hope of freeing Ireland after more than seven centuries of English rule. Green republican uniforms (heather green for the volunteers, dark green for the ICA) had been common in the streets for three years. Battle exercises had been held outside some of the most imposing, and-to republicans-most British, of Dublin’s buildings, including the 18thcentury General Post Office standing in what was then Sackville Street and is now the widest street in all of Europe, O’Connell Street which has eight lanes and a center division.

  But a holiday is a holiday. On that Easter Monday, people caught trams, or rode bicycles, or walked-and a wealthy few took their cars-to the sea, or Phoenix Park or the Wicklow Mountains, or the Fairyhouse Racecourse ten miles away fro the Irish Grand National, and others sat yawning on their doorsteps. Only a few Dubliners found reason to be in the city center, but any who happened to pass near the General Post Office shortly before noon might have seen a ragged group of some 150 heavily armed men rush inside. Soon afterward, two of the more smartly uniformed men appeared between the Ionic columns of the building’s great classical portico and, as their comrades-in-arms assembled behind them and a small crowd gathered in front, one of them read a proclamation.

  “Irishmen and Irishwomen,” he began, “In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.” Passers-by continued walking, or if they did stop, seemed indifferent as the orator proclaimed the establishment of the Irish Republic as a sovereign independent state and announced the formation of a Provisional Government. When he had finished, his colleague turned and warmly shook his hand. If a crowd understood that a rebellion against England was in progress, they showed no excitement. Wartime had inured them to curious happenings. They shrugged their shoulders, or smiled, or looked round expectantly for the police.

  Despite the general indifference to the event, this was the most momentous event in Dublin’s history, the Easter Rising, Sean O’Casey, at the time a member of the Irish Citizen’s Army and not yet known as a dramatist, was to describe 1916 as “the year one in Irish history and Irish life”.

  On the Sunday after Easter, Dubliners were again able to move freely in the city, and they came out in large numbers to view the destruction. They found Sackville Street, which had been one of the most beautiful thoroughfares in Europe, a wreckage of gutted brickwork and smoldering heaps of rubble. In the city as a whole, 179 buildings had been destroyed, the streets were littered with masonry, half-burnt debris, cart-wheels and the shot-out remains of cars. The human cost had been 450 persons killed and 2,614 wounded, including army, rebel and civilian casualties. Most people were angry at the loss of life and property, and resentful of the rebels who had brought it upon them. “Shoot the Traitors! Bayonet the bastards!” the crowd shouted as the main body of prisoners was marched away to army barracks. Women in the poorest section, pelted them with rotten vegetables and emptied their chamber pots over them.

  Severe and destructive though the fighting had been, the aftermath of the Rising left a far deeper and more lasting imprint on Ireland. The British authorities had already declared martial law on Easter Monday. Immediately after the cease-fire, they began a series of summary courts martial. Ninety people were initially sentenced to death. Although 75 of them-including Emon de Valera-had their sentences commuted to penal servitude, 15 were executed by firing squad. Patrick Pearce, 36-year-old leader of the Irish Volunteer Army paid the supreme price on May 3, 1916. Connelly, who had been brought from the hospital in an ambulance was shot, on May 12, while tied to a chair. A sixteenth rebel, Sir Roger Casement, was hanged three months later in London, after conviction for treason.

  The war for Irish freedom against the English would be waged in a terroristic fashion by a small but militant army for many decades until a peace initiative was signed in the early part of the 21 Century, nearly one hundred years later.

  IV

  WINNIE WHACKER

  The summer of 1948, was the “best of times and the worst of times,” according to Charles Dickens in the “Tale of Two Cities.” For Buddy Quinn it was also the tale of freedom and the cost associated with maintaining it. Buddy had gone to spend the summer of his seventh birthday with his mother. She had enrolled him in a Summerscape Learning Program at the parish school of St. Louis Bertrand in the Limerick neighborhood in the old Irish area near Central Park.

  It was a wonderful program for early childhood education and day care for working parents…all sponsored by the parish at no cost to the parents. What a gift, and in 1948 there weren’t so many of those being handed out. The minimum wage was a buck an hour and work for those who happened not to have a formal education was difficult to come by. So Katherine Quinn had lucked out with the help of Sister Mary Como and the good folks at St. Louis Bertrand.

  Most essentially Buddy was extremely happy in the program. There were many children his age living in the neighborhood. Two boys in particular, Bobbie Joe Thomas and Ernie Simms lived a block from Buddy and they
began to walk to school together each morning which saved Katherine from backtracking from the parish to Brook Street and the laundry which totaled nine blocks. In the evening the boys were permitted to walk home together and Katherine knew precisely, where she would find Buddy in the evening. The boys became attached at the hip…The Three Musketeers were together from sunup to sundown, running the streets, playing baseball and in the evenings Father Edwards loaded as many as he could get into his Ford station wagon and took the kids swimming at Central Park, and after the pool closed, he would drop each off at his or her home.

  This arrangement left Katherine and her new love interest, the very married Ham Hambrion (sic, Merwin Sylvester Hambrion) plenty of time to lounge around the small efficiency and get to know each other. Most often Ham was even there when Buddy got home around eight o’clock. This was fine with Buddy until it was time for bed and then he wanted Ham to be on his way, so he could have a few moments with his mother.

  “Tell me of your day Buddy,” she would ask.

  “Well me and my Lads went to school where we had a fine day. I drew some pictures and read a few books.”

  “And what did the paintings look like?”

  “One painting was of a man and woman kissing.”

  “Was it someone you know?”