Jaywalking with the Irish Read online

  Ireland had always promised a separate reality, a place where we could let down our guard and slide into the amble of conversation, both feeling like we somehow just fit. This conceit may have been no more than a holiday-steeped dream, but its sway held. We contemplated moving to certain seashore towns closer to home, but they seemed too similar to what we already had, promising more of the same dull earnestness and fastidiously programmed lives that we wanted to escape, if only for one more fling at youth or freedom before it was too late. One night in March we looked at each other and said let’s finally do it; let’s embrace one great adventure before the children grow any older and our next rendezvous with excitement will have to be postponed to our denture days.

  The decision was not easy. Our fathers were newly deceased; our widowed mothers were aging visibly; beloved uncles and aunts were reeling from one disease to another; my wife’s sister had been paralyzed from a car crash for years. Were we heartless, or selfish, or brave? Or screaming fools?

  “How can we possibly know that you are who you say you are until six months have passed?” asked the bank lady. My, but she had a point.

  Return to beginning of chapter

  Chapter 3

  “Jamie, come here!” I shouted. Pottering about in the front room, I had just discovered a photograph on an alcove wall that jabbed shivers down my spine. It was of a stone cottage in a sheep-studded greensward bordered by a Kerry “beehive” – one of those conical, shoulder-high stone formations thought to have been erected for hermetic monks to sit in for weeks at a time while they meditated on the Lord or cursed the infernal rain. The foreground revealed a six-foot-long stone slab lifted high on three standing stones – the configuration imitating that of the ancient dolmens that pagan Celts may have used as altars for praying or sacrificing choice cows or irritating daughters. Nobody rightly knows, because these mysterious structures were built one to three thousand years before writing came to Ireland.

  “I didn’t pack this – did you?” I demanded, certain that we had left a nearly identical photograph on the wall of our study in Connecticut. Having been on hand at the creation of these particular monoliths, I had taken that picture.

  “No, absolutely not.”

  Bizarre. The cottage, dolmen, and beehive were the handiwork of a dear friend of mine named Bun. In the monsoon-wracked winter of 1975, I joined him to muck around with troughs of cement at the end of Kerry’s magnificent Dingle Peninsula, between an English-speaking village called Ventry and an Irish-speaking one called Dunquin and the celebrated Blasket Islands beyond. The winds howled and a mad shepherd screamed while we troweled stones purloined from the recently dismantled movie set for Ryan’s Daughter into the slowly rising walls of the very cottage in the photograph – this strange hieroglyph to my own past.

  Journeys are said to often assume the shape of a circle, but this was too much. Beyond uncanny, it breathed over the house like a talisman. Bun Wilkinson had been a beloved figure in my life, and his spirit had forever beckoned us back to Ireland.

  In September 1973 I had rented a gate lodge on the Hill of Howth on an isthmus north of Dublin, a clapboard bungalow at the entrance to a nineteenth-century estate that was ringed by cliffs and elaborate gardens lazing above the capital’s vast bay. The address, ten miles from the Trinity College I was meant to be attending, was half country at the time. Alas, Ireland’s gaudier classes are now paying one and two million pounds for digs in the vicinity, which their parents could have purchased for a song. Back then, the shady Ceanchor Road and its neighboring lanes whispered refuge. Cows swatted flies across the lane and the post office was a dark parlor in an old lady’s gloomy house. On the long lawns of the Stella Maris Convent a thousand feet away, Joyce’s Leopold Bloom enjoyed his celebrated frolic with Molly, which was reenacted there in Joseph Strick’s film of Ulysses.

  The cliffs ranged in a mile-long crescent to the unicorn-white tower of the Baily Lighthouse, whose young keepers used to invite me up for late-night bottles of porter. Their foghorn moaned through winter nights so damp that one could have scooped glasses of water from the air. Like a monk in a Kerry beehive, I read constantly – above all, Brian O’Nolan who is better known by his pseudonyms of Flann O’Brien and Myles na Gopaleen. His fabulous characters leaned so long into their bicycles that they became half-bicycle themselves, and were stalked by noncorporeal beings with names like De Selby and Joe. Flann O’Brien celebrated a world only partially awakened from dream, one that was still prone to roll back to sleep if that strategy would make life’s demands go away. He drank himself to ruination.

  But what a mark did Flann leave:

  Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with . . .

  Examples of three separate openings – the first: The Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class, sat in his hut in the middle of a firwood meditating on the nature of the numerals and segregating in his mind the odd ones from the even. He was seated at his diptych or ancient two-leaved hinged writing-table with inner sides waxed. His rough long-nailed fingers toyed with a snuff-box of perfect rotundity and through a gap in his teeth he whistled a civil cavatina . . .

  The second opening: There was nothing unusual in the appearance of Mr. John Furriskey but actually he had one distinction that is rarely encountered – he was born at the age of twenty-five and entered the world with a memory but without a personal experience to account for it . . . His knowledge of physics was moderate and extended to Boyle’s Law and the Parallelogram of Forces . . .

  The third? Buy the book. You either have a taste for such toying with reality, or, lacking Irish ancestors, you don’t. In any case, mothers should warn their sons against reading At Swim-Two-Birds, or any other works by Ireland’s most famous hallucinator. Alas, mine didn’t know better.

  Ireland in the early 1970s was still a Flann O’Brien world, a place where bicyclists inscribed slow circles on misty back roads, and the night’s last buses erupted with raucous song, often with the driver joining in. Of course, just when things seemed idyllic, the IRA would detonate a horrendous bomb in London or Dublin, while in Northern Ireland, only eighty miles from my Howth refuge, masked avengers from both sides of the sectarian divide would shoot out each other’s knees. The grim reaper meanwhile was kept infinitely busier on the killing fields of Vietnam.

  I knew all this, but could gaze endlessly at Dublin’s ever-changing bay and the Wicklow Mountains listing through purple clouds to the south, and think of Ireland as a romantic haven, perfect for an apprentice at ignoring responsibilities.

  Farm fields clambered up the hill behind my cottage to a dense rhododendron forest beside Howth Castle, where a massive dolmen spoke back through the ages. Beyond lay what was then still a fishing village, while doubling as a yachting playground for young Irish movers and shakers like Charles Haughey, later to become the most notoriously underhanded and high-living prime minister (called a Taoiseach, or “chief of the leader”) in the country’s history: Tricky Dick with a wink.

  Bun, three decades older than myself, was looking after the semi-abandoned estate that included my gate lodge beside the cliffs. A widower, he had recently nurtured the owner through her cancerous final demise. Like me, Bun was at a crossroads, though he well hid whatever anxiety he felt.

  He offered me tea the first time we met. Three hours later I stood up, in wonder at the richness of his conversation and the refrains of laughter that he tossed around like bouquets. I would have rented that gate lodge if it had three walls, because he filled the place with grace. I can still picture him walking up the dirt driveway to greet me in weather bleak or kind, bounding with the exuberance that was his gift, and whistling, always whistling – he was whistling me forward.
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  I would shuffle around the cottage in the morning, perhaps frying fresh herrings bought at Howth’s pier, with the door thrown open to the light and, by mid-February, a sea of daffodils waving outside. Under an archway of woven vines, the same small robin, infinitely tamer than the heftier, redder-breasted North American version, waited patiently. I’d sit down to breakfast and the robin would skitter in. Merely pushing my chair back a foot was a signal for the robin to hop onto the table. Then this preternatural little bird sidled onto my plate, claiming the crumbs of brown bread and fish. It happened nearly every day. Sometimes an auburn-haired German girlfriend would read me poetry as we lay back in the grass. Trinity? Trinity was my secret joke. The place had no idea what I was doing.

  Not once did I ever hear my father whistling; not once did I ever see him walk with Bun’s buoyant gait; and it lifted my spirits to have a man so much older than myself finally fill my life with encouragement and the idea that the world could remain full of vibrant color as one grew older. Those mornings still seem close, when there would be that cheerful whistling sounding through the hedges whenever Bun arrived with his baskets of hot bread or scones from the oven, or vegetables plucked from the extensive walled gardens he tended by the main house below.

  “Good man yourself,” Bun would say, his blue eyes beaming above his long sloping cheeks and craggy chin. Although tall and powerfully shouldered, he moved with a lax ranginess, a lack of physical self-consciousness that is rarely found in an adult. His son Paddy, now in his mid-fifties and my friend for nearly thirty years, moves the same way.

  The kettle would be fired up, and rambling dialogues would ensue on just about any subject under the sun. At night there were trips to Gaffney’s pub at the top of the hill, then a country place, where the owners, spellbound by Bun’s talk, slipped us into the back room for more wild storytelling after closing time. Whatever I read or thought was reviewed and enriched by Bun, rather than the Trinity College lecturers to whom I was a passing shadow.

  Drummed out of pre-law studies for which he was thoroughly ill-suited, Bun dabbled briefly for a time at acting. He in due time followed his older brothers into farming outside Dublin, just as his Anglo-Irish planter family had been tilling Ireland’s soil for three hundred years. Eventually selling his farm, Bun came to Howth in the late 1960s to set up a wood-carving shop. Then he taught himself to chisel fantastical figures in stone. What he carved best were stories, and parades of daily visitors – lorry drivers, lawyers, jewelers, and fishermen – showed up in hopes of losing themselves in his magical tales. Whether we were having tea in the conservatory of the run-down main house where he tended grapes, or smashing croquet balls around the ballustraded lower garden by the bay, or hiding in closets to escape unwanted visitors, laughter ruled. On weekends, he hosted trips to every curious and beloved Irish place he knew. Through visits to ancient monasteries, the wilds of Connemara, or mad parties until dawn at his brother Dick’s Wicklow cattle farm, Bun made a gift of the Ireland he treasured and introduced me to every last person he’d met. Often we traveled to a Tipperary village called Terryglass, to help with his son Paddy’s exquisite pub restoration. The singing there, with Bun on the squeezebox, was mighty.

  A demon for making wine, Bun regularly dispatched me to gather for his concoctions wild dandelions and rose petals, and to scour Moore Street’s bawling, open-air vegetable stalls for the most leathery carrots that could be found. One absurd night, a friend in the Irish Communist Party and I scaled the walls of an army barracks in order to nip a bushel of military carrots that we had spotted in the yard. “Bun had better be happy now,” shouted my friend as we jumped onto his dodgy motor scooter, our sack of purloined provender safe between us. Fortunately, no bullets penetrated our derrieres.

  “Ambrosia and nectar” is the way Bun described the resultant elixir, which he called carrot whiskey, proffering it with a rolling hand motion and diabolical glint to his eyes.

  “It’s only enough to kill a hardened sinner. Drink deep.”

  I did, and drank in the essence of an Ireland I had come to love. With Bun, every day was an inspiration. All it took was for one of us to start a sentence and the talk would flow for hours. He was a soul mate, such as one rarely finds a second time in this life. When the year finally played out, Bun and I parted with tears. Neither one of us knew what we would do next, only that we had shared a unique interlude in which two ages of life crossed in a way that is rarely available to fathers and sons.

  A year later, Bun invited me to Dingle to help with that cottage, his testament in stone, whose picture would ineffably materialize in our newly rented house in Cork. He had started this project with his latest young love (women fell for Bun constantly), but that affair had played out, leading to the bugle call my way. There was laughter alright after arriving there, especially when we stole saplings for replanting from the local convent, or hurtled over the roads smashing crab claws – offered from an admirer in town – on the Renault’s floor for instant snacks. But, alas, all was not perfect this time. Dingle’s panoramas drop jaws in summer, but the winter weather proved unspeakable. The gales lashed off the Atlantic, and the quarters in Bun’s building-site trailer, or “caravan,” were cold, cramped, and too close. Our joyous equilibrium of the year before became tainted by some of reality’s heaviness. Both of us had the weight of uncertainty on our shoulders, our private anxieties mounting about what lay ahead.

  We parted reluctantly at the end of 1975. If only I had known then that I was saying goodbye for the last time. Letters crisscrossed constantly, Bun’s lengthy, eloquent missives keeping my alternate Irish reality ever vivid. Bun and his son Paddy occupied themselves in restoring stone buildings around the Irish countryside. Meanwhile, back in America, I struggled to piece together a living, but never stopped thinking of my old friend. Suddenly, on a dark November day in 1982, I received word that Bun, now in his sixties, was dead. The loss never healed, and here I was called back again under his sign, trying to ease my entire family into a country that was now ineradicably changed.

  Return to beginning of chapter

  Chapter 4

  Earlier explorers of distant lands often returned with spectacular tales of having to hack their way through dense jungles, climb hoary mountains, or traverse wild seas in order to reach their El Dorados. Our family’s first tasks, after arriving in Cork City, kept leaning toward the tedious. Arrangements for a new phone line were attempted with at least eleven different help lines at Eircom, the privatized national phone monopoly that seduced 400,000 Irish people, most of whom had never purchased a sheaf of stock in their lives, to buy shares that became worthless overnight. And no wonder, because none of the cheerful operators at Eircom had the slightest ability to connect with their colleagues at the next desk.

  “We have a comprehensive basic service for thirty-two punts per month, or in your area you might wish to consider installation of a special ISDN Internet-access line.”

  “How much will that cost?”

  Silence. Crackle. Dead phone.

  Twenty more calls and still nobody has the answer.

  “Do you want a split line?”

  “I’m not sure . . . Wait a minute. Wait just a minute.”

  Crackle. Gone.

  Cork’s Department of Motor Vehicle Taxation recently came up with the perfect bureaucratic solution – announcing that, due to unmanageable volumes of calls seeking personal assistance, they were henceforth suspending all answers to that line.

  Nevertheless, we solved each tedious logistical challenge in its turn, and even landed a checking account from a bank manager who evidently bet his vault’s holdings on dark horses. Meanwhile, our boys kept recruiting one friend after another, while rapidly maturing Laura steeped herself in books about Ireland, and gingerly tested the waters with a couple of slightly younger neighborhood girls. Jamie, attempting to stake her claim in an unfamiliar world, nested with a vengeance. Armed with a block of “Fairy” soap, she organized every corner
of the house, from drawer to shining drawer, and began to make sense of mysterious Irish household entities such as the hob and “hot press,” the linen closet that also houses the hot-water tank, invariably controlled by mysterious electrical timers. In fact, everything in this house seemed to be controlled by a network of these things, which turned washing machines, dryers, and furnaces on and off at their whim.

  One afternoon, I found Jamie muttering in the laundry cubicle, which we had been told housed “the most advanced American appliances.”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, seeing her scowl.

  Thereupon, she produced in either hand a formerly adult shirt, now shrunk by the most advanced imported American appliances to miniature elfin sizes. Until very recently, the Irish used to believe that the missing sock problem was explained by fairy mischief, which suddenly seemed plausible to me.

  “Just right for a leprechaun who fancies Marks and Spencer,” she growled.

  Women of course possess a knack for establishing networks that could cement kingdoms over problems just like this. So hassles small and large became fodder for constant visits with the neighbors. For a while, it seemed that every time I turned around, gregarious spirits like Breda Higgins, on the day shift, or the hilarious Belfast-born Mary Lynch, who preferred to stop in after 10 p.m., appeared in our kitchen to transform conversations about their favorite “cling film” or the mysteries of Gas Mark 6 on the cooker into weightier discussions, often ending in peals of laughter, about Ireland and America, restaurants, shops, movies, novels, and the like, before digressing into the more personal stuff of passions, memories, and dreams. Thus was our web of new connectedness woven, with Jamie dispensing tea or wine as was called for, and mixing as freely as if she had been in Ireland all her life. The idea had been that we’d just settle in for a sabbatical of renewal for one year or maybe two. But watching my wife and kids embrace their changed lives, forever seemed possible too.