My Father Left Me Ireland

by Michael Brendan Dougherty

  Ireland alone went forth to assail evil, as David Goliath, unarmed, save with a pebble, and she has slain, I pray to God, the power and boast and pride of Empire. That is the achievement of the boys of 1916, and on it the living shall build a sterner purpose, and bring it to a greater end. If I die tomorrow bury me in Ireland, and I shall die in the Catholic Faith, for I accept it fully now. It tells me what my heart sought long in vain—in Protestant coldness I could not find it—but I saw it in the faces of the Irish. Now I know what it was I loved in them—the chivalry of Christ speaking through human eyes—it is from that source the lovable things come, for Christ was the first Knight. And now my beloved ones goodbye—this is my last letter from the condemned cell. I write it always with hope—hope that God will be with me to the end and that all my faults and failures and errors will be blotted out of the Divine Knight—the Divine Nationalist.

  These Irish men and women of the Rising and the struggle against England in the years afterward were modern people, which is to say that they were people who could be easily labeled and analyzed by professional historians and our intellectual caste. Their social position could be vivisected: they were a typical revolutionary generation, a rising class of educated people who would be excluded from normal positions of power absent a major shake-up. Their writings and thoughts can be easily tagged—Victorian Gaels, nineteenth-century nationalists, progressive educationists—and then filed away. And yet these people of a century ago had done something that was never supposed to happen. They asserted the rights of the Irish in arms, and won the creation of an Irish state. They had done something that modern people should no longer be able to do in a world of trench warfare, gas attacks, and mass-mechanized death. They became legends. They lived on this edge of life, where aloofness was burned away until some greater conviction emerged.

  In quieter moments you have said that you wished you could believe, you just don’t. And I know nothing I write or say can change that. Just as the archbishop could not make Roger Casement repent of Ireland’s cause. You insist that before the Tiger, Ireland was a dark place. Who, looking at it honestly, can fail to see its faults? Some of its peculiar defects did leave a residue here in America. It could be coldly intellectual. It could become the vindictive enforcer of a Victorian morality that made no sense in Ireland. Even now I find the speed at which Irish Rosary sodalities move through their prayers totally alien and alienating. Worst of all, it abetted child abuse and hid this crime through moral cronyism, elaborately disguised as a fear of scandal.

  But the idea that there is nothing for Ireland to do with fifteen centuries of Christianity but celebrate its destruction with dry sherry seems uncreative somehow. If a man like Casement could see something in it, surely there is something you might. The idea that there is nothing “useful” in the Rising for modern Ireland also seems like blindness. There is another Kavanagh poem about Irish religion that haunts me. Often titled “Pilgrims,” it found no publisher in his life. It recounts the way Irish people went to a holy well, seeking life, knowledge, and vision, but all related to the immediate necessities of life. “Life that for a farmer is land enough to keep two horses,” or “Knowledge that is in knowing what fair to sell the cattle in.” But these very practical petitions are answered with something greater.

  I saw them kneeling, climbing and prostrate—

  It was love, love, love they found:

  Love that is Christ green walking from the summer headlands

  To His scarecrow cross in the turnip-ground.

  * * *

  —

  When I was a young man, I was not pushed anywhere near the edge. Unlike Casement, I had nothing like the pride and boast of Empire to confront in life. I had no needs so earthy as those in Kavanagh’s poem. But I did choose to confront you. I needed to send you my petitions.

  On a Saturday afternoon, I went to the library of my college and ended a decade of silent treatment, of having ignored your letters. I wrote you a long one, trying to condense my teenage years into a dozen or so pages. I was proud to give my report: I’m at a good school. I had learned to fend for myself as my grandmother aged. I could cook. I still watched after my mother. I had one serious girlfriend when I was in high school, and another serious girlfriend now that I was in college. After some journeying, I had come back to Catholicism. At the same time, I tried to demonstrate to you that I was arch, witty, and smart. I was no sucker, or raving lunatic. I wasn’t sentimental or self-deluded. All in all, I was a young man to be reckoned with.

  I would cringe to reread it now. All the above amounted to a series of not so subtle digs about how different I was from you. This is who I am, I seemed to say—and the heavy implication was that you had nothing to do with it. And you ought to get to know me; maybe I’m worth knowing.

  But was I worth knowing? I doubt it. Not only was I painfully insecure, I was shallow. Someone who approaches life like a curator will exchange his faith for merely believing in belief. He’ll substitute taste where conviction belongs. I was content to slide down the surface of things.

  Still, you treated this little gesture as if it could be the basis for going forward. It wasn’t long afterward that you and I arranged to meet up in New York. You would bring your wife and your other children, my half siblings whom I’d only met in pictures you sent me. I’d bring that girlfriend, the woman who is now my very pregnant wife.

  And soon enough I would find out just how deluded and full of myself I really was.

  Your son,

  Michael

  IV

  Marooned by History

  O you are not lying in the wet clay,

  For it is a harvest evening now and we

  Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight

  And you smile up at us—eternally.

  —Patrick Kavanagh, “In Memory of My Mother”

  Dear Father,

  In the long letter I wrote to you in college, the one where I tried to tell you who I was, I talked about my grandmother dying and its effect on our lives. When I was a child, she had looked after me until Mom came home from work. But in my teenage years, the roles reversed. As I got acne, she got Alzheimer’s. And it was my job to keep an eye on her, to make a simple dinner, to be ready to call for help if we needed it. This affliction caused her to misplace herself in the timeline of her own life. At first it was harmless stuff. Instead of saying Clinton was president she might refer to President Reagan, or Nixon. But the sweetness of her spirit began to dim, and a rarer, tougher side came out. It was as if her personality were migrating backward in time, moving from the green hedges, lace curtains, and safety she had attained in the suburbs, and heading back to the childhood streets of New York City. We called it her “Brooklyn chin,” when she would push her jaw forward in preparation for battle.

  Actually, we preferred her anger to the flashes of despondency and depression. Sometimes Mom and I ignored her little mental mistakes, to save her the embarrassment of correction. Sometimes, in frustration, we pushed back a little, both of us convinced that in certain moments she was “giving in” to this sickness. As if she might, with a moment’s pause and sufficient will, renavigate the synapses in her mind, and find a way to be fully present with us.

  We wondered at this darker side coming out of her at the time. But the tortures of her shifting perspective are more obvious to me now than they were then. I can remember her sitting at the table, looking at the newspaper. She mentioned someone’s name, a long-deceased relative’s, and I could see in that moment that she was living within herself as a younger woman, one with a living husband and young children, seated proudly at her mahogany dining-room set, in the little white home in Bloomfield that she worked so hard to keep neat. In that brief instant she’s just enjoying a moment of rest between tidying the kitchen and the living room.

  But then she looked up, and instead of her husband, there was I, her te
enaged grandson. The mahogany table was still there, beneath her elbows. But the light striking across it and making its surface glow with orange blaze was from the window in her daughter’s condo. And in that moment all the losses of her life were reinflicted on her. Her sisters, her husband, her youth, her home, and the sure feeling of a grip of herself. All gone. And the loneliness in that loss staggers me. And now I realize our own frustration at her condition was the effect of her Alzheimer’s on us. This disease of the mind also misplaced us in time and history. The moments of anger and bewilderment my mother and I experienced then were the grief and bereavement of the future visiting us in our present. She died on the same day as Princess Diana.

  * * *

  —

  Manhattan was thick with dark blue Yankees caps on the Saturday night that you came, in response to my letter, to meet me again. It was Game 6 of the 2003 World Series against the Florida Marlins. If the Yankees lost, it was over. The city was heavy with a primal, almost manic energy.

  You and I were the established diplomats at this meeting. We were the ones who had memories of each other. Everyone else would have to be introduced properly. Your wife and my half siblings to me, and the woman I would marry one day to you. Over dinner you made jokes about how the Irish people were taking advantage of the Celtic Tiger, flying to New York for the very favorable exchange rates. You yourselves were already Christmas shopping that October day. Nothing to declare at the airport, of course. The Irish were now allowed to be flush with cash, but had to keep up the reputation as tax cheats and smugglers.

  After dinner, my sisters and your wife departed, and some of my other friends met us out for drinks. They were curious to meet you. The Yankees took Pettitte out of the game and put in Mariano Rivera. Josh Beckett was still pitching into the late innings. I explained to you the mechanics of hits, outs, and strikeouts. And why my friends, all Mets fans, were giggling at the sorry fate of our crosstown rivals. The Yankees’ best hitters up in the bottom of the ninth. Bernie Williams, Hideki Matsui, and Jorge Posada. Flyout. Flyout. Groundout. It was over. The citywide fever broke and a spirit of dejection settled on Manhattan. My friends and I clinked glasses. You laughed at this and won them all over.

  At the end of the night, you walked my girlfriend and me to the platform in Grand Central. You hugged me and we said our good-byes before I boarded, and the last train of the night pulled me away from you. In a few hours, you’d be over the Atlantic, flying away from me. I felt like it had been a good meeting. The first time we had met without the mediation, or the subsequent fury, of my mother. Maybe this is how we could proceed, as two men. This was my answer to all your charmed visits: At the end of it, I intended you to feel like you had missed out. But even though everything had gone according to my plan, I felt the glow of my victory over you dissipating.

  As the train made its way back to my mother’s house in the suburbs, my girlfriend told me how she and my siblings studied the two of us as we sat next to each other. You and I each took turns running the table with storytelling. They had been comparing notes through the night, totaling up the expressions and gestures that we shared. They began tallying all these things I had inherited from you—the smirks, and shrugs, a boyish gleam—even though I could not have learned them by imitation. My friends saw the same thing, she said. Everyone could see it, she said. Everyone except me. It began to dawn on me that our relationship wasn’t a series of events, but an unalterable and primordial fact. The events were just the record of how we coped with this truth.

  My girlfriend and I arrived home at nearly four in the morning and changed for bed. I was trying to change the subject, but she kept talking about you. I lay down and she put her hand on my chest and asked me how I was doing. I said I had realized on that train platform that even though I saw you only a few days or hours at a time in between years of separation, that I could pick you out of a room of a thousand men who were cloned to look like you. And instantly, I was that boy again, standing on Farrandale Avenue. I broke down and bawled my eyes out until sunlight. You leave; I cry. Again.

  There was no ironic distance, no getting away from this sorrow. I simply accepted it, in full. I was not fatherless; I had missed you. Not “missed” in the sense of having spent my time pining for your company or in mourning your absence. I didn’t pine that way. I had not been an emotional wreck. I had simply missed you, the way one discovers having missed an entire way of life when it is too late.

  The facts, only now dawning on me, remained: I had got on with my life in America. You had got on with yours in Ireland. I had passed almost every night from boyhood until that moment without you. I had a father, and I had missed knowing him. That was my story. All the times I had let your letters come to me and returned nothing to you but my callow silence came back to me as reasons to grieve.

  Still, there was hope. Something between us changed that day. The cards you sent me for my birthday and Christmas from then on would come alive, with questions about the real details of my life, which for a night you had witnessed. The stories you relayed about my sisters and brother came to me and I could attach them to faces, voices, and personalities I had met. We could build from this, I thought.

  * * *

  —

  Five years after the train station, the woman I love was handmaking thick, stamped, and luxurious invitations for our wedding when she decided to broach the sensitive subject. How would everyone feel if you, your wife, and my siblings came to the wedding? If we did invite you all, where could you be seated to avoid any chance of confrontation with my mother or her brothers? Hadn’t they vowed to avenge my mother’s honor if they met you again?

  At first I dismissed it, but I wondered, Should I go on missing you?

  After debating the finer points of seating etiquette, I thought, Let’s send them. Let’s make a point to show it isn’t some empty courtesy. We’ll send one invitation for each of them individually. We want them all here and we’ll deal with the fallout.

  A week later. My phone rang, and you thanked us. So nice of us, you said. Your wife and daughters could not believe that we had ourselves made these complex invitations with maps and gold print. “But Michael,” you said, “it wouldn’t be right.”

  “What?”

  “It wouldn’t be fair to your mother.”

  “I’m not putting you at the head table. You’ll be fine. I promise. My uncles—”

  “I can’t just show up as your father. After twenty-seven years not there,” you said.

  We had thought it all through, I protested. But what could I do? Argue you out of feeling ashamed? As a boy I had disclaimed you as father. Now that I was a man, you felt unworthy to stand so close and claim me as your son. Though, you assured me, the invitations were beautiful. And, well, you all appreciated the gesture. You’d visit afterward sometime.

  * * *

  —

  After the wedding, my mother’s state continued to worsen. I have often wondered what my flight from home contributed to it. Maybe seeing me settled, she felt like she didn’t have to worry so much. She was diagnosed one by one with all the mysterious ailments that strike the lonely and the disconnected: depression, rheumatoid arthritis, and fibromyalgia. And her complaints about them now strike me as mild.

  Those mystery ailments had driven her from her job at IBM. She applied for disability, and then did contracting work as a digital assistant to make ends meet. Unknown to me, she also borrowed against the house during the boom and refinanced her debts. The long boom that had underwritten so much stupid optimism in the 1990s was over.

  At the time I was torn between the home I was building with my wife and the home that built me. Mom sent me texts constantly, angling for me to run errands. Could I do “a run” to pick up a takeout dinner she ordered, or to get cigarettes for her? I so often resented these tasks and rolled my eyes. She should have the confidence and wherewithal to do them on her own. She s
houldn’t give in, I thought.

  What had happened to my mother? Where was this fiery woman who had backpacked around Europe? The woman with the confidence to wear Cartier and Chanel while picking up her son from play school? Who taught herself to speak Irish from a handful of textbooks and audiocassettes, who wanted to emigrate back across the Atlantic Ocean, who in her love for and rage at you promised she would bomb Ireland if there was one other scoundrel like you in it.

  Here she was in middle age, dependent on her son. Ashamed to take his money to fix the heat but too needful to refuse it. She was becoming mysteriously childlike at times. She asked me to do all these errands because they also created a reason for me to come home and spend a little more time with her.

  She was frozen in self-doubt. The condo she had bought to put me in a decent school district had shot up to an enormous value during the boom and we had urged her to sell it at the top. She and her mother had bought it in 1994 at a price of $180,000. At the time, the mortgage note was for less than half that price. By 2006, condos like hers were appraising for more than $400,000. We told her to get out of this and downsize. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  I’d stop over on the way home from work. I remember the octagonal white serviette that I would bring from the kitchen to her bedroom. The items I arranged on it for her were the intersection of bad habits and the worst diet advice that experts ever offered. A giant pink mug full of orange juice, ostensibly for the vitamin C. Next to that another mug of coffee, made with French Vanilla Coffee-mate and three blue packets of sweetener. Next to that a grapefruit. And finally something like rice cakes. Or a “low-fat” frozen bagel, with low-fat cream cheese. Or just some whole wheat toast, supposedly good for the heart. Finally, her pack of Virginia Slims Ultra Lights. I had given up on convincing her to quit smoking. I gently teased and hassled her about the coffee, which I found tedious to prepare, instead.