Jaywalking with the Irish Read online

  He was called Diarmuid.

  Dermot?

  Diarmuid.

  Once, people in Ireland were called James or Mary, Francis or Margaret. But the man’s son was Feidhlim, and a girl in the garden below was Aoife (pronounced “Eeefa”) – the most popular Irish girl’s name at the moment – and the simple “Michael” is often pronounced the Irish way as “Me-hall,” while Rory has reverted to Ruairi. The native Irish tongue – spoken by 90 percent of Corkonians 150 years ago – may be dying out, but people from Dublin to Donegal are christening their kids and pets with phonics-defying concoctions of vowel disorders. There are Aoifes beyond counting, and Ann has morphed into Aíne. How Aodhagan is pronounced is anyone’s guess. Perhaps to help people figure such things out, dozens of schools have cropped up where all instruction is conducted in Irish, even though almost no graduates will speak it in their daily lives. Diarmuid’s children attend one of those. In fact, all Irish children study their ancestral ancient tongue for twelve years and develop some appreciation for the irreducible poetry of Gaelic, although most rarely utter a word of it afterward, despite the fact the government spends countless millions duplicating forms and signage in a hopeless dream of reviving the country’s dying native language.

  “Did you just get in, like?” asked Diarmuid.

  Our past connections and fresh hopes were described.

  “Ye have moved to an excellent park,” he said, using the peculiar Irish-English expression for culs-de-sac. “You’ll find no trouble here. It’s very safe, and there are heaps of kids who get along just grand, like.”

  It sounded too good to be true – would in time prove far too good to be true – but it was what I wanted to hear, because surrounding the children with a web of reassuring intimacy was our first goal.

  Diarmuid went on to explain that the sizable terrace houses in Bellevue Park were built for ascot-wreathed army officers who once were deployed in keeping ever-defiant Cork, the Rebel City, under the imperial English thumb. Field Marshal Montgomery, who would become famous for vanquishing Rommel’s panzer divisions in North Africa and leading the Allies’ northern pincer into Germany, began his military career there, as did Lord Percival who presided over the ignominious fall of 130,000 British and Allied troops to the Japanese in Singapore.

  “Twenty-one bullet holes are lodged into these houses from one skirmish with the Irish Republican Army,” my new neighbor told me. In minutes, because Diarmuid is a talker, I learned that history’s ghosts lay all around.

  A thousand feet up Military Hill from where we stood, the rank-and-file occupation troops had been housed in a sprawling barracks that has since been renamed after Michael Collins, the charismatic leader of the 1920–21 War of Independence. As the rebellion intensified, the British filled the place with hit squads of roving irregulars, including a thug-like group known as the “Black and Tans.” In one brutal episode, a drunken Tan shot a sixty-five-year-old Cork priest through the forehead. His mates also murdered Thomas MacCurtain, the first duly elected lord mayor of Cork (and a commandant in the Irish Republican Army). The replacement mayor, Terence MacSweeney, was duly arrested and promptly went on a seventy-four-day hunger strike, culminating in his death in October 1920.

  IRA guerrillas got even by tossing a petrol bomb into a car full of Black and Tans outside the barracks, killing one and wounding several others. The next night, December 11, the Tans undertook a booze-soaked rampage, burning nearby houses before proceeding into the city center where they torched half of St. Patrick Street, the public library, and the town hall, beating pedestrians, kicking priests, killing two men in their beds, looting, and destroying shops by the dozen.

  A disgusted participant wrote his mother in England shortly afterwards:

  In all my life I have never experienced such orgies of murder, arson, and looting as I have witnessed during the past sixteen days with the RIC Auxiliaries. It baffles description . . . Many who have witnessed similar scenes in France and Flanders [during World War I] say that nothing they had experienced was comparable to the punishment meted out to Cork.

  Suddenly a shout arose from the children playing on our newly rented lawn, and a soccer ball went careering past our heads.

  “Notice that your garden there is a perfect rectangle,” Diarmuid observed. “That’s because it once served as a tennis court for Montgomery and the other Brit scoundrels. But, ah sure, no one will hold that against ye.”

  My new friend laughed and walked off with a smile, but I wondered.

  The next morning boasted an astonishing display, for Ireland, of brilliant sun. I found the boys fast asleep in their bunk beds, with their treasured blankets from infancy lovingly tucked by their sides. At the top of the ladder to Owen’s perch, a favorite stuffed bear, handmade by a friend, kept a tender guard. At the bottom rung, two pairs of slippers waited, toes out in perfect symmetry, while photographs from earlier good times stood reassuringly on their dresser. Already, Jamie’s protective touch of order had transformed their new room. It would clearly not take her long to cast an aura of belonging over our new home.

  Feeling blessed, I walked to the top of our lane where another neighbor quickly put out his hand, introducing himself as Pat O’Neill. Not Paddy, but Pat.

  He had keen blue eyes and a gaze that left the recipient nowhere to hide. It became apparent that Pat O’Neill had watched our arrival closely. He said he had worked in New York and California and loved America, thought it was the best country in the world. Really? In Ireland, one tends to take such grand statements, in fact assertions of every kind, with a grain of salt. This is because many times a cheerful pronouncement actually is but a lure to draw a person out. Pat next warned us to watch ourselves because it was very different in Cork, that everybody minds each other’s business constantly.

  “They call it the valley of the squinting windows,” he explained, as children not seen the day before began lingering curiously outside our green gate.

  Another neighbor introduced himself as Shaun Higgins and, with a barely concealed smile, asked if I was a journalist.

  And was he a bloody espionage agent? True, the Irish Times had just published a humor piece I had penned from the U.S. about certain peculiar Anglo-Irish expressions, and I planned on doing more magazine and newspaper writing about our adventures. But I hardly thought the whole country would be placed on red alert with my first offering, much less peg me on sight.

  “I saw ye get out of the taxi yesterday and couldn’t help wondering if ye might be the person who wrote the newspaper article about moving from America to Cork, and I don’t mean to be forward, but I was just curious, because it was funny. Ye don’t have to tell me of course.”

  Like hell I didn’t. In Ireland, they can still coax information from your pores, can charm and entice typically overly frank newcomers into revealing all manner of things. In Ireland, fresh information is treasured like pearls plucked from an oyster. One man may have a wallet choking with fifty pound notes, another a slick new car, but he who has collected the most secrets will in some way feel the richest at the end of the day. Pat O’Neill pretended to be refinishing his iron fence – he never stopped chipping away at that thing as the months passed – but he was listening to every word, not wanting Shaun Higgins to mine the fresh ore before he did.

  After spending thirty-five years as a ballet dancer, a few early ones as a boxer, and working the stage in Dublin and on Broadway, Shaun had a gift for fast conversational footwork. A great character, he was born at the other end of the terrace from where he now runs a bed-and-breakfast with his equally engaging wife, Breda, at that moment eyeing us from behind a curtain. Running a B&B seemed like an occupation from Ireland’s earlier era of modest expectations. But hold on, it turned out that Shaun and Breda pocketed enough from all those rasher, tomato, blood pudding, and egg plates, to holiday for four months every winter in Florida or Australia, or both. Did they need an assistant?

  “Well, I wish ye the very best here with us, a
nd if there is any way we can help, please ask,” Shaun offered warmly. It felt as if we were being welcomed into a village, rather than some anonymous foreign city.

  In search of food, I found my way to a prodigious supermarket whose offerings would have once filled a hundred corner shops. In fact, it was about ninety times larger than an early Irish prototype I used to visit on Dublin’s north side, back when such emporia were as exotic to the island as string bikinis. That sleepy bazaar had proffered such delicacies as dirty spuds, burly cabbages, and fatty mince, along with tinned kippers, tinned steak and kidney pies, and tinned tongue, the latter foodstuffs having virtually disappeared since. Back in 1973, food was not something with which the Irish pampered themselves, nor was much of anything else. The ancestral memory of the Famine still hung over the land.

  But behold now. A shivering chill pervaded this cavernous new supermarket, and the engines of its refrigeration systems rumbled as if a Boeing 747 might be advancing down aisle eight or nine. Gauntlets of frozen dinners and pizzas gave way to seemingly infinite varieties of potato chips, called “crisps.” Plain, cheese and onion, salt and vinegar, smoky bacon, barbecue, steak sauce, garlic, pickle, sour cream, prawn cocktail, cracked pepper, pizza: endless fantasy flavors beckoned in the place of the kettles of boiling spuds that once graced every hob and hearth in the land. The adult Irish clearly still adore their spuds – only the trendiest restaurants would think of serving a meal without heaps of them, one fried or mashed and the other baked and saturated in some form of goo. Potato skins, potato wedges, potato salad sandwiches, potato pancakes and soup – all are freely available too. Yet Irish chip shops now import all their spuds, and a dinner partner would soon bemoan that his children were losing track of the potatoes in their souls. “There was no pasta in this county when I was a boy. Pasta is not Irish. Rice is not Irish. But that’s what the kids want now. Who knows where this country is headed?”

  In any event, the aisles of crisps gave way to walls hung with plastic garden chairs, cappuccino machines, and black brassieres of a shocking scantiness. Another department offered choice single malt whiskies; Finnish vodkas; Hungarian, New Zealand, Chilean, South African, and even Lebanese wines – wine from about every sun-blasted country on earth. In the 1970s, a person asking for wine in Ireland would have been regarded as a boarding-school prat. But now people in a working-class suburb were tickling their tongues at delicate tastes from free sample bottles.

  With a groaning cart, I proceeded to the cash register and an object lesson that Ireland, despite its eager strides into the “never-never,” as they used to call a life built upon debt, can still entail curious time travels. As my purchases were added up, a frown settled upon the cashier’s face. “I’m afraid your total comes to £117. We have to clear all credit-card charges over £100 with our central office,” she said in a somnambulant tone that suggested this drill was repeated often. “Won’t be a sec’.”

  People back in the queue, evidently long inured to the practice, began to sag their heads and age visibly as the clock ticked. And ticked. Finally the clerk returned from the far ends of the store.

  “I’m very sorry, sir, but you have a foreign credit card and it won’t go through. Credit cards are meant to be used in their country of origin.”

  Was this a signal to drop one’s spuds on the floor and head for home? I had told our friends I knew Ireland inside out, but I suddenly didn’t know where I had brought my family at all. Clueless, I pulled out another equally foreign credit card, whispered hocus-pocus, and jettisoned some nonessentials – the bottle of Bordeaux hurt – to bring the total under 100 punts. Voila!

  After sharing a fine lunch with the awakening family, I set to other organizational vicissitudes. And here came another rendezvous with Oddness Abroad. In addition to the usual government bureaucracies, a newcomer to Ireland must cope with several huge and Byzantine monopolies that might as well be called One and Only Electric, Amalgamated Phones, and Go Away Insurance. None, I’d been warned, would talk to potential customers unless they had first established a checking account, which sounds simple enough until one discovers that, on this logic-defying island, this is about as difficult as wresting top-secret clearance from the CIA or MI5.

  An accountant’s son, I imagined I had prepared for every mundane exigency required. So later that afternoon, I entered a branch of one of the most powerful banks in the country, and, after the appropriate introductions, confidently dropped a quarter-inch sheaf of financial documents on the desk of a prim middle manager, explaining my quest.

  “It’s a checking account you’d like, is it?” she responded in that peculiar way that Irish people have of tediously restating what somebody asked clear as day, turning the simple communication into a question, and looking out at the idea in dazzled wonder, while they buy time to arrange their secret thoughts.

  “That’s it.”

  Mousy-eyed and purse-lipped, she proceeded to eye our bona fides with a drawn-out fascination that made me think she was savoring the pleasure of divining and memorizing for later conversation every last detail of our family’s financial secrets, just as Pat O’Neill had warned.

  “You have a valuable house.”

  “Yes, a fine house.”

  “And two cars and some savings.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Very good.” Flip went some more pages, then she sighed.

  “It’s an unusual situation.”

  Day Two of our brave adventure and my palms were sweating before the task of pleading for a checkbook. Some explorer.

  Finally, the bank clerk fluffed out her white sleeves and leaned closer. “Although our normal policy is not to issue check-writing privileges until a customer has been with us for nine months, perhaps we might be able to bend things a bit in your case, and authorize this in six months if your transactions prove to be orderly.”

  “But I’ve had a checking account since I was sixteen.”

  “I’m sure you have,” she replied coolly. “But none of your records specifically pertain here. Not to cause any offense, but how can we possibly know that you are who you say you are until six months have passed?”

  The odd truth is that this was in some ways a fair question, considering we had uprooted everything that makes for a person’s identity – a career, a community, a home, friends and family all left behind. Why? I didn’t have the words to make her understand. I kept insisting that I still had a contract to produce one of the lucrative newsletters that I had researched and written for fifteen years, a worldwide publication for cardiologists, not realizing that ace in the hole would unexpectedly lose its corporate backing and vanish in another four weeks.

  She knew what she knew and we just didn’t make sense. We had thrown off the most enviable stability any parents can give their family, and why? For the vague quest to make one’s life new at the dubious age of forty-seven, and in Jamie’s much better preserved case, forty-two. Not checking-account material then.

  Our spacious (and newly rented out) house in Connecticut was located at the end of a third-of-a-mile-long driveway into a sanctuary of five hundred acres of woods. Our town was a picture-book place with white-steepled churches, a red clapboard-covered bridge over a trout-filled river, and eight hundred full-time residents, most of who knew each other well – too well. At night we could hear coyotes yowl, and wild turkeys giving up the ghost to feasting great horned owls and bobcats. Harris was enthralled with the life in that forest. He, Owen, and Laura would happily idle away their summer days on the lake five minutes down the path from the door we never locked. After school in winter, they hurtled down the slopes of the nearby family-run ski area and were whisked back home in time for hot chocolate and supper. Neighboring parents would look after each other’s children without a second’s thought. It was about as perfect a place as modern-day America offers for raising kids.

  And yet, after twelve years of impersonating model parents, we were itchy. People in North America’s endless suburbs
and smaller towns have withdrawn into hermetically sealed worlds. They buy their groceries, pick up their mail, fetch their children from school, and are never otherwise seen again, unless they participate in some ruthlessly organized activity like the drill teams of children’s sports named U.S.A. Hockey, or U.S.A. Little League, or U.S.A. Pick-Up Sticks, each with a dozen pages of officially sanctioned U.S.A. Rules and boards of governors to look after the behavior of each U.S.A. Child.

  The creature comforts and automobile to-and-fro of modern life swallow entire families into oblivion. Televisions offer two hundred channels, video shops two thousand movies, and the Internet connects people to previously unimaginable distractions from all over the globe – but not to their neighbors. The thralls of easy celebration that united previous generations have all but vanished. Americans have become ever more serious and efficient, and increasingly antisocial, thanks to men and women slaving in equal measure, both being too exhausted and time-starved at the end of the day to pause for a social drink or street-corner chat. This guardedness may reach its worst extreme in a historically reserved New England community like Cornwall, Connecticut, where the preening of six hundred or so weekenders arriving every Friday from New York City adds an extra measure of status to set against mixing too freely. But the art of free and easy conversation is dying, and isolation is a peculiar by-product of modern affluence everywhere.

  For a long while we remained patient, sure that things would change. They did and they didn’t. Friends were made and rites of passage shared. But undercurrents rippled through our town that looked so ideal to outsiders. Here and there, the circles of sociability began to implode. Yesterday’s glowing young mothers latched onto desperate schemes for self-improvement in the battle against growing ennui and lengthening crow’s feet, while their husbands grew more distant or clouded with self-doubt. Barbs between dinner guests grew sharper, and one day we looked around and realized that things would not likely improve. One after another, couples were bitterly breaking up and sometimes reconfiguring in awkward new arrangements. Meanwhile, Jamie and I were getting restless ourselves, and older.