My Father Left Me Ireland

by Michael Brendan Dougherty

  All I ever wanted was for things to change.

  I had never thought any of it through until then. I didn’t really know why you lived three thousand miles away, I just knew enough not to ask. But this announcement revealed to me the secret hope in my heart. Until this moment, I had imagined that one day you might sit down and announce that you had found a job in America. And so you would see me more often, and my mother too.

  Living without you was normal. But when you were around, things seemed open ended. All the things I didn’t quite understand made me think our family could be patched up. Your announcement revealed this hope in me by extinguishing it for good. For the first time, and from then on, I would never be deluded again. I would grow up a fatherless child. And nothing would change.

  Years later my mother told me she had screamed at you in the car on the way to the airport. It should have been her to tell me, at the right time, she held. But you and I both know, in situations like this, there is no right time. There is just the news.

  Up until then, my mother might have let me draw you a doodle and include it in a letter back to you. Or even sign my name to a birthday card. Up until this time, I remembered some talk of me coming to join you in Ireland, by myself, in the summer months. All the little markings in the letters, all the talk of a more proper relationship between father and son was now at an end. My mother would put ideas to me as objectively as she could. I could go and stay with you there if I liked. I shouldn’t worry for her but give my own answer. But my ability to give the solicited response would not fail here. How could I leave the woman who stayed with me? How could I leave the woman whose life, I was coming to believe, was ruined for my own sake? I was the man of the house, from then on.

  Nearly a quarter of a century later, on another gray day in Ireland, you and I were together again, this time in working-class Finglas. It was then, in my early thirties, with my wife using her phone to photograph us, that I watched my first hurling match. Twenty-five years from the time a hurl was put into my hand, until I stood on the pitch. It took me twenty-five years to discover that the blue stripe near the bas on my childhood hurl was the blue of your Dublin team. In the same time, I had only seen hurling as a snippet in a famous Guinness commercial, while you had spent some time almost every week following the local club. And in all that time in America, none of the many substitute father figures in my life, my uncles or teachers, came and put an ash baseball bat in my hands.

  We stood there in the light rain in Finglas and we watched a match together, shuffling backward and forward toward the edge of the soggy pitch, watching the players run through the rain. Their hurls raised, as if in some kind of ancient form of combat. Once a sliotar was airborne, a man would instantly smash it downfield toward the hand of a jumping teammate, who, in one smooth motion, returns to the ground, tosses it in front of his body, slips through a clatter of hurls defending against him, and then blasts it with his own, sending it fifty yards through the air and between the goalposts. My wife drew my attention to the fact that you and I hold ourselves the same way. When we put our hands on our hips, we unconsciously point our thumbs forward. Almost everyone else on earth holds their hands the opposite way. It was easy to enjoy the action, and the interested murmuring on the sidelines, and our sense of closeness. But within a few minutes, the entire distance of the Atlantic Ocean opened up between us again. The instant a sliotar fell into the hand of a man well positioned in front of the goal, you shouted “Bury it,” in your Dublin accent. An instant later, an instant too late, I would let out a very American “C’mon!” Two feet apart and twenty-five years separating us. I had no feel for this game, for its rhythm, its clashing sounds and terrifying speed. Sport—the very thing that made it easy for almost any other two men to find ease and commonality with each other—reminded me instantly that in your presence I am family, but still unfamiliar. I am proximate, nowhere near close.

  I felt on the edge of the pitch that if I was Irish at all, it was only in the most technical and bureaucratic sense. The Irish state, recognizing the circumstances of my birth, must give me a passport and allow me to live and work in Ireland if I choose. If I came, a week after all the Irish people give me their charming and clichéd “Welcome home,” the same Irish people would be obliged to dismiss me as a “blow-in.”

  At that hurling pitch in Finglas, I would have said my mother’s great effort was in vain. What was my Irishness? It was my pedantic correction to those who say “Saint Patty’s Day” rather than “Paddy’s Day.” It was my mother’s drum, the bodhran, under my bed, unplayed in years. It was my overfamiliarity with these men of the Rising on the walls of O’Connor’s Public House on Route 22 in Brewster, New York. It was an accident, reinforced only by my Irish last name, which created the expectation that I should be interested in and knowledgeable about Ireland.

  Because I was raised apart from you, my Irishness has to be self-consciously asserted or it ceases to exist in me. My siblings, who grew up in your home, could be or do anything and some residue of Irishness would stick to them and to all they do. It is their accent and their memories. It’s in the story their American and English employers tell about them. It’s the smile of recognition that creeps across their face when their friend rolls his eyes at another “Dub” who helplessly reveals himself as a Northsider or a Southsider.

  I, on the other hand, am what many Irish people would call a plastic Paddy. A Yank. A tourist who stumbles on a ruined castle and thinks it’s the old family homestead, then babbles about how good the Guinness is wherever I happen to land in Ireland, when, objectively, the Guinness there is a bit shit.

  And there is something else to contend with. To even consider Ireland a nation is to invite a sneer from her most privileged citizens. We’re all supposed to know that it is something else: a thing the British invented out of a hodgepodge of anarchic clans and a smattering of leftover Vikings, a fiction that we now see through, a dodgy tax shelter robbing the EU. All nations are in some way dissolving, we’re told, and that the dissolution is a good thing. Ireland’s national pride is a font of violence, a spur to extremism and superstition. And besides, Ireland is a failure. It has always been a failure. After all, my ancestors left. James Joyce left. Ireland’s children still leave. They send back selfies from Bondi Beach in Sydney. They send back money from Vancouver. They leave for better climate. They leave for jobs. They leave to escape the gombeen men, the swish of the soutane, and the stony gray soil.

  I have to laugh. They all leave, but you stayed.

  * * *

  —

  A few weeks ago, it was my turn to make an announcement: My wife is pregnant with your first grandchild. My half sisters just had brunch with us in New York, and they relayed your prediction, made upon hearing the news: “He’s going to get into his roots.” You are already right. That very week, a question had fallen on me. What songs should I sing to my daughter when she comes? It occurred to me that in a few months I would have this life wriggling across my lap. I would have to tell her who she is. The question left something in me changed, changed utterly.

  I am suddenly alive to the idea that I could pass on this immense inheritance of imagination and passion if only I could work up the courage to claim it for myself. After that brunch, I ordered a dozen children’s books in Irish. Ahem, as Gaeilge. Many of them are the books I had in childhood. I bought an Irish dictionary. I’ve been collecting books about the Rising. And relearning the songs that inspired it, making a mental catalogue of the ones that were suitable for lullabies. I’m sure it all looks crazy.

  I know that when I try to assert this Irish thing, it seems soapy, “Oirish,” or just hopelessly quixotic. But I do not lack for company. The men of the Easter Rising had backgrounds that made them self-conscious and assertive about their Irishness. Tom Clarke’s father served in the British Army. Patrick Pearse had a slight Birmingham accent, inherited from his father. Éamon de Valera, born in New
York City, was ridiculed as a half-Spanish bastard. All on account of their fathers. I’ve come to think that these men have something to tell me in this moment, as I become a father.

  This child, my child, is coming presently, and I am determined not to withhold any part of my heart from her. And I need to be fully present to her. I feel this invigorating need to be stronger and better than I have been. That my manhood is at stake. And if there is an inheritance to be had in being Irish, I will recover it for her. And I need you for both of these missions.

  All my life, save for a few weeks, has been spent an ocean away from you. Now, for this child’s sake, I hope to bridge that gap. It means finding a way back to each other, doesn’t it? And for me it also means asserting the Irish thing, the way my mother did.

  How did we get to that field in Finglas, looking like father and son, but sounding like foreigners to one another? How did I come to this desperate feeling of wanting to recover all these artifacts of Irish nationalism, at the very minute Irish people are happy to throw them away? Sometimes I get the sense that the moment we catch a serious emotion our temptation as men—as Irishmen?—is to do what your man did with the sliotar: bury it. And there still is something unsaid between us.

  Your son,

  Michael

  II

  Putting Childish Things Away

  The modern Irish, contrary to popular impression, have little sense of history. What they have is a sense of grievance, which they choose to dignify by christening it history.

  —J. J. Lee

  Dear Father,

  It wasn’t long after you gave me the news about my baby-sister-to-be that you began to cut my mother out as our go-between. You would address your letters to me directly. You would update me on my sister. Then my sisters, plural. And finally inform me of my impending little brother. From your perspective, I’m sure it seemed like the minimum you must do. You never once disclaimed me as your son. But by this point, I was disclaiming you.

  The next time I saw you was in 1994 and I was wearing the exact same outfit as on that day I wept on Farrandale Avenue. The tartan tie, the short-sleeved white shirt, and the gray pants had all been ordered from yellow sheets of paper, in larger and larger sizes, year after year. These were the final days of my sixth grade, my final ones in uniform as a Catholic-school boy. Mom’s job had moved to Westchester, and we were moving with it.

  I was sitting at my lunch table when a friend drew my attention to a stranger peeking in through the door from the hallway. You stood out easily among the students in uniforms and nuns in habits. One of those nuns came over to the table and informed me that you were waiting to see me. I tossed my bologna sandwich into a garbage can, and there you were. It had been three years, and suddenly you were here again, without warning.

  We were invited out into the huge expanse of pavement that was my place for recess. I can remember talking to you out there, while the principal watched us from the door. Bells rang and classes restarted, but we stayed out there. You gave me a white-and-green shirt, with Saint Patrick on it, celebrating Ireland’s participation in the World Cup, here in America. You were going to see the match against Italy at Giants Stadium. And then after a few minutes you were gone.

  I went back in and joined my classmates in the duties of the last days of the Catholic school year, cleaning our own classrooms. Everyone asked me about you. “Your dad? Really?” “From Ireland? Really?” Some envied me the privilege of not seeing my father for years on end. I was tempted to agree with them.

  It was a bright, balmy day. The sky was streaked in tangerine when school let out. Normally I might have taken the public bus home. Today, I walked and thought. Who were you, anyway? You were the man who showed up every few years. The man who wrote me letters about the latest developments in his household, the home in which I played no role.

  You were what my mother reminded me you were: not here for me. You were not here a summer earlier, when a wild-eyed man running along Bloomfield Avenue punched me in the head. You weren’t there when the winter before that I had suffered two concussions in a week, and my mother endured the horror of knowing her only son was being hospitalized while she sat in traffic on the Tappan Zee Bridge. You weren’t there when I had to overcome being the boy in class who got teased constantly. You might have taught me to be brave or stoic. Or perhaps your presence in my life would have given me a confidence that warded off this treatment.

  I turned up Parkway West and saw that Mom’s car was in front of the house. Why was she home early? Maybe we were all going to get dinner. I put the keys in the door. And there she was, relieved to see me. She had rushed home when the nuns informed on your sudden presence. It turned out that it wasn’t just a meeting without warning for me, but one without authorization from her. She hugged me, asking me what took me so long getting home, and telling me how she worried I might be on a plane, kidnapped and heading for Dublin. I was asked to debrief her on every detail of the encounter.

  Once the story was established to her satisfaction, she put you on a kind of trial. The facts: You came and saw me. But obviously you were in America for other purposes. Namely, the World Cup. And seeing a friend in Philadelphia. Couldn’t I see that adding your son to the list made a better and more noble cover story with your wife, for what amounted to a getaway to Giants Stadium with your friend?

  I put that St. Patrick’s World Cup shirt in my drawer and never wore it. But my mother and I talked about it. We told ourselves a story that the Irish had printed it up in a foolish and oh-so-Irish belief that qualifying for the World Cup destined them to win it. We told ourselves that you bragged about your son in the pubs back home, but my mother was stuck with all the real work. It was in stories like these, the stories I told myself, that I was gathering the strength to put you out of mind for my teenage years.

  I was putting Ireland itself out of my mind too. Or trying to, and it wasn’t hard to dismiss it, since the Irish “thing” was changing for us here. Ireland for me had been the boyhood weekends with Irish-language revivalists, or with the sad drunk émigrés in Queens. It was frivolously contributing to NORAID, and being dimly and stupidly proud of the mayhem the word “Irish” seemed to carry in it.

  By September 1994, there was a ceasefire in Northern Ireland. And this development seemed to change everything. My mother, without ever feeling a need to explain the apparent change in her politics, was singing along to the Cranberries and their tuneful denunciations of the Provisional IRA, as we unloaded boxes in our new townhouse in Putnam County, New York. The flat caps were no longer passed around for widows and orphans. The whole social constellation that revolved around Irish America’s version of Irish nationalism was falling apart. At least for us. Our sense of Ireland no longer came from these little retreat houses and Queens bars. Many of the Irish emigrants themselves went back home as the economy started to pick up. Irishness now came out of public television, the enormous new bookstores and movie theaters popping up along Interstate 84. It wasn’t people, but stuff, this cultural flotsam coming across the ocean and being sold to us.

  We had a CD by a Canadian Irish group, the Rankin Family, playing endlessly, along with Enya and Black 47. Soon it was the Corrs, and more experimental stuff by Sinead O’Connor. In the following year, there was Michael Flatley’s Riverdance, passing quickly from Eurovision to American PBS and into semiconstant rotation on our VCR. Tim Pat Coogan’s book The Troubles came out and so did Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. One of my cousins denounced it as “ethnic essentialism,” and thank God she did. At the time I’d take anything to relieve me from the Irish.

  Ireland was also turning into a kind of New Age symbol, one being sold out of the tiny incense shops you’d find in vacation towns in New England. Reconnect with your roots. Get a tattoo of Celtic knots, then reinvigorate your soul through Irish paganism. Let the wisdom of ancient Druids save you from your lame legalistic sacra
ments and deliver you to knowledge of your chakras, or whatever. It all fits in with the enlightened Eastern traditions, and the insights of astrology, we were told, and sometimes we pretended to believe it. We never took it seriously, though we did stop going to church. Irishness alone allowed us to claim spirituality on the cheap.

  You would send me more clothes with the word Ireland printed on them—I remember a jacket you sent for Christmas. I never wore it. The way to fit in with my friends was to wear a puffy New Jersey Devils Starter jacket. You sent me a dual CD of Irish folk legend Luke Kelly’s greatest hits. I shelved it and never listened to it. I preferred Boyz II Men. My extended family bought tickets to see Riverdance at Radio City Music Hall, and I at least pretended to find it tedious.

  What was Ireland, beyond this tidal wave of consumable stuff crashing through our home? In the 1990s Ireland was retelling its own stories to itself, in the belief that it was finally coming into its own. Perhaps because Irish identity seemed more and more like a commodity, something touched up and sold to the world, the Irish wanted to be unsentimental and undeluded about their history. Somehow turning Ireland into a product for consumption by the diaspora and the rest of the world allowed the Irish to take stock of themselves. As usual, they found themselves wanting.