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We made the trip to
Ireland when I was ten, after my father had started in on the renovation of our
house; work he began most likely as a bulwark against what I always thought of
as his sulks which were long periods
of dark and erratic behavior, episodes of which were becoming more frequent,
the gloominess a rising tide, then, for reasons that were mysterious to a boy
my age, but if I had learned anything from my elders it was that idle hands are
the devil’s work and a project is good for a body, even a project involving the torturous
reconstruction of our home if it would get him out of his bed, which he stayed
in for long periods, often not opening his door at all until the late
afternoon, sometimes only after I was home from school, and so the fact that he
had a purpose of sorts seemed like a positive development for all and sundry, and
thus the work began (it began, I feel, with the sound of a nail being
reluctantly removed from a piece of wood, mewling like a newborn) and the carpenter my father contracted to
abet him in the task was a moppy-haired Irishman named Bernie Mahoney, who was
an exemplar of a type dad gravitated towards, dad always having the deepest
respect for the “working man” having been one himself, for most of his life, a working man, up until his diagnosis that
is and his love of the man who my dad referred to in Yiddish as chaim yonkel which means the man on the
street or an average Joe, kept my father in relentless natter with cab drivers,
fire fighters, construction foremen, cops, stevedores, iron mongers,
electricians, garbage men, train conductors and plumbers, and as an
amusing side-note because of dad’s
obsession with organized crime (it was the seventies, the era of the godfather
movies and the French Connection and the mob was indeed rampant especially in
Boston where we lived at the time) but in
any case every Italian was mafia and every Chinese was Triangle and every
Irishman in Boston was Sinn Fein to my father, which was surely paranoia, but
more importantly the prospect of the illicit clearly added to dad’s passion for
the lumpenproletariat; so was Bernie IRA, of course not, but that did not stop
dad from speculating a lot at the rag-ends of the working day about who was, or
might be, over dinner, at the kitchen table, with us, his rapt brood, when he
was covered in the detritus of his work, the renovation, Bernie having gone
back for the night to wherever it was where he and his own kind lived, and dad was
intermittently talkative then though lapsing into thoughtfulness at times, fork
pausing between plate and mouth, that is, occasionally appearing to suffer wistfulness,
maybe from withdrawal from the brotherhood he had developed with Bernie, his
special Irishman—though Bernie was not the first Irish ambassador to our home in
fact, there were, come to think of it, a parade of Irish nannies and
babysitters charged with looking after my sister and me, let’s see there was June,
or she who spread the margarine and ope’d
the Spaggetti-O’s; and Agnes, or she
of the snot-colored macintosh (a Joycean twofer if ever I heard one); and Maggie
who worked for my grandmother— Maggie, or she
who called me “tiger,” and consequently she who “gave rise to all my foolish
blood,” there were Irish all around me that is to say that there were clues that the Irish were special, a
chosen people in the eyes of my father, though the true confirmation of this
special status came in the form of the carpenter Bernie, who my father adopted as
his own brother, as he was a real
man-of-the-people and like Joyce’s Humphrey Chimpton Earwicker a “man of Hod, Cement and Edifices”
to boot, someone dad could chew the fat with about football, or The Troubles in the north, who he could complain with about anything that smacked of the
overly liberal, feminine, or new-fangled: fern-bars, Jimmy Carter, Japanese
cars, jogging— don’t get me started because he and Bernie could always be found
working away or scrapping over some piece of construction minutia, or just
sitting on the stoop while Bernie brogued on about what-have-you the upshot of
this burgeoning bromance being that eventually dad decided, to the rest of the
family’s mortification that he himself was, in fact Irish which was a tricky
act to pull off being a Polish Jew
from
the Bronx, and so the first signs of dad’s newly adopted nationality came in
subtle additions to his lexicon and then worse in his manner of dress, big sweaters
and watchman’s caps, and finally in the form of a new household soundtrack,
heralded as I was in my room one afternoon by sounds of strangulation—like an
oboe being gelded, or that nail I was telling you about being pulled from that
wall—but these were the Uuilleann pipes,
a traditional Irish instrument we suffered the sound of as Dad had bought up
the complete LP catalog of The Chieftains, a traditional Irish band who played
reels and folksongs on pennywhistles and bodhráns who were only the advance
guard in what was to become a major musical action we were later to endure a
Clancy Brothers period, followed by The Irish Rovers, and finally The
Dubliners, who were by a large margin my favorites, I think, because of their
intrinsic lack of polish—there was something a bit too slick about the other
outfits and the Dubliners were clearly booze-addled misfits, for even as a tyke,
especially as a tyke (and still now) I loved a lost cause—the Red Sox, Han Solo &tc and I have an innate
dislike for anyone who is, or who gloms onto, a sure winner (Yankees, Yankee
fans) so to this day, I could sing to you any number of Dubliners songs,
word-perfectly, though only if made drunk enough which was precisely how the
Dubliners performed their music, drunk
enough such that when they played, they broadcast their drunkenness, they sounded
like they were teetering on the edge of starting a fight, passing out, or weeping,
especially one of their singers, Ronnie Drew who looked like he was newly risen
from the dead, and the other guy, Luke Kelly, who was the opposite full of life
and redder, head to toe, than any man you could ever meet— a human volcano
blazes boiling, or as Jim Joyce who I would later read would put it, a
“broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled
shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed
brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero” (not unlike how my dad
appeared to me) who garbled their lyrics and some of it was even in Gaelic
which for a kid who had trouble catching the lines to even the Grease
soundtrack (my sister’s) comprehension here was difficult but still one got the
gist: the English are bad; very bad; obviously, Ireland is a place of great
beauty and treachery (and rocky roads), miners have a hard lot, towns are
dirty, people in battle brandish pikes which I was pretty sure were fish, and
the love of one’s country is a terrible
thing but paradoxically something also to be proud of, and sex is, if thickly veiled in metaphor, never far from the
Celtic imagination oh and someone named Parnell once did something
or other and now, let’s have us a pint (which is a volume of liquid) maybe up
in Monto (which is a place) so I was given my first impressions of Ireland from
reels and patriotic ballads; drunken songs—the most drunken of which was about
drunkenness itself and was called Finnegan’s
Wake and was sung by Ronnie Drew and the verses were sort of free like a
baroque recitativo with a riotously up-tempo staccato chorus, a jig which went
Whack fol' the dah will ya dance to your partner
Round the floor your trotters shake
Isn't it the truth I told ya?
Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake
bought on vinyl (which
was all we had back then) by my father who loved one Dubliners song even better,
he loved it the most, it was called “Fiddler’s Green” and he featured it heavily in
the rotation it begins As I walked by the
dockside one evening so fair/To view the salt water and take the salt air/I
heard an old fisherman, singing a song/Oh-oh take me away boys me time is not
loooong…as you might be able to discern it's a soulful little number—a bit
of a cradlesong: lilting, simple, bearing a striking resemblance to the Irish
folk ballad “Molly Malone” (cockles and mussels) which, like “Scarborough
Fair”, was having a bit of a renaissance at the time in the music rooms of
Boston’s grammar schools, the point being, aside from “Fiddler’s Green’s”
musical merits, I imagined the reason dad enjoyed it so much is that he had
served in the merchant marines when he was younger, and had a lifelong
affection for the sea (dad was a man of grandiose affections) and so thought of
himself in vaguely Melvillean terms as a sailor gone to land and seed, and who
occasionally felt the need to knock off people’s hats (the sulks) that is to
say: one day he would again set sail,
and set sail he did, figuratively that is, on a plane, with us along with him,
back to what had become his imaginary homeland, Ireland
“…What
is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen
—Ireland, says Bloom”
and
it was simply inevitable that we, as
a family, would have to visit those murky, level shores of Ireland, and in the
summer of the same year that Bernie began work in our attic and birthed that
nail, we landed there and took the long meandering drive from Dublin down to
Cork, (home of John Joyce, father of James, and Simon Dedalus, with his
delightful baritone) finally arriving in Goleen, or An Góilín, population
at the time: five hundred Christian souls, on the southernmost tip of the
island, the last trailing tassel on Ireland’s shawl, and the seat of Bernie
Mahoney’s family (Bernie himself stayed in Boston for when push came to shove
he was after all an employee), my
father, mother, sister and I lodging in a lighthouse—no inns or hotels for us
as we needed to experience the isolation, gloom, and existential despair of
Ireland’s southern coast full bore,
while every night, my sister (who had it out for me and probably for good
reason) and whose room lay above mine beside that groaning tower, would stamp
one foot and then drag the other all around the floor above (my ceiling) in a
demented gavotte, and it wasn’t until I was in high school, high school, that I realized that there
probably wasn’t a sociopathic, game-leggéd lighthouse keeper, probably with a
hook-hand, trembling upstairs to spill my young blood—and so the trip was
comprised almost entirely of lows, most of which were atmospheric: the weather
was forbidding in a way that doesn’t do justice to the word, and there simply
wasn’t much to do for a ten year old boy like myself other than sit by the
window, look out at the gorse, the maledictive stones, and the troubled grey
sea, and draw the suns and stars we never saw in the condensation on the panes
of glass, occasionally jumping as if electrocuted when the floorboards creaked
(Hook hand) while
the
highlight of the trip, if you can call it that and I’m not suggesting that you
do, other than discovering that there are palm trees in southern Ireland (Gulf
Stream), was seeing my father, for the one and only time in his life completely
and utterly stinking drunk so here’s
how it happened: a couple days after arriving in Cork we made the
pilgrimage to Bernie Mahoney’s brother’s farm Bernie’s family possessing as
Gabriel in The Dead tells us all the
Irish traditionally possess “certain qualities of hospitality, of humour, of humanity” which is to say that
they were lovely, keen, sweet, boisterous and kind people, who treated us like
their own and were in every way the postcard Irish family one reads about
overseas so they served us lunch followed by what could only assumed was the de
rigger whisky for the
heads of household and my dad never drank but there was no greater sin in my
father’s eyes than refusing hospitality, especially from the salt of the earth,
which the Mahoneys were, in spades, they seemed literally to be covered in salt, and earth, and so he proceeded to throw back a couple of (what one
could only assume was) their finest and dad was watching, the entire time for
some subtle indications from the Mahoneys that he had drunk enough, and now on to
something else, but the signal was never given and he became caught up in
the moment and he drank Gaelic toasts like air do shlàinte, and he “he
drank to the undoing of his foes, a race of mighty valorous heroes, rulers of
the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster silent as the deathless gods…” and
he drank to Bernie and his brood, drank to all those of Hearty Cork Extraction,
and none of us, we Mendelsunds that is, noticed that dad was the only one at the bottle, unbeknownst,
the Mahoney clan, like most who resided in the quaint hamlet of Goleen, were
famous “pioneers,” having taken the sobriety pledge, and sworn off the stuff
for life and, well, you may not be aware of this, but alcoholism is,
historically, a big problem in Ireland
(Ireland sober is Ireland free) I suppose the Mahoneys kept a bottle on hand
for just such an occasion, and only such
an occasion when an alien family of boozing city-slicker anthropologists
from America like ourselves would descend on them like we did, and being
courteous and all…but the entire southern end of Ireland was caught up in
temperance societies, antitreating, and the general issue of “the drink
problem,” and were therefore the Mahoneys and everyone else were more sober
than a convent
And
then there came out upon the air the sound of voices and the pealing anthem of
the organ It was the men's temperance retreat conducted by the missioner, the
reverend John Hughes S. J., rosary, sermon and benediction of the Most Blessed
Sacrament They were there gathered together without distinction of social class
(and a most edifying spectacle it was to see) in that simple fane beside the
waves, after the storms of this weary world, kneeling before the feet of the
immaculate, reciting the litany of Our Lady of Loreto, beseeching her to
intercede for them, the old familiar words, holy Mary, holy virgin of virgins
How sad to poor Gerty's ears! Had her father only avoided the clutches of the
demon drink, by taking the pledge or those powders the drink habit cured in…
meanwhile, (and putting
aside the Boston Irish for the moment- which is indeed a large contingency),
the whole of Boston was inebriated beyond belief, judging from the behavior of
my friends’ parents, mostly from zinfandels and pinot gris (mostly the goys of
course) but not us, and certainly not my dad, though why he didn’t drink: I had no idea and hadn't honestly given it much thought but I was so very uncomfortable sitting there in the dining room at the Mahoney farm and
tried various gambits to distract the company away from my father’s mounting
inebriation like moving around a lot in my chair and asking self-consciously ten-year-old-kid-style
questions about the wee people and
whatnot
Mr
Dedalus’s cup had rattled noisily against the saucer, and Stephen had tried to
cover that shameful sign of his father’s drinking bout of the night before by
moving his chair and coughing
but the subterfuge was
transparent I’m sure (children imagine themselves to be shrewd but all their
ruses are known) and drinking
continued until we brought him, my father (I can’t remember reluctantly or
willingly) to the car, so wet with booze he was we brought him to the car in a ladle; he (my father) was always a
sight, intense of gaze, disheveled, strange in his dress and prone to outbursts
under the best of circumstances (really more a Fyodor Karamazov then a Leo
Bloom remember those sulks and outbursts I was telling you about) but drunken
dad was an amazement, is there is
anything more distressing than a drunk who never drinks it’s like a category
error, unnatural and regrettable, especially, Lord, when it’s your own parent,
who sang the entire way home while driving and did we even hear a chorus of
Fiddler’s Green, but maybe let’s say for the purposes of this memory of mine
that he did, for at that moment he had surely
arrived at the green’s very gates though the entire episode was surely more an
instance of Finnegan the hod-carrier, awake again, because of the Bushmills or
Jamesons or whathaveyou, which means, in both Finnegan’s case, and in my
father’s: he’s revived—and he was happy and all those worries (what were
these worries?) momentarily neglected
and needless to say the experience humanized him for me a bit both in the sense
of abasement, and in the sense of
making him more approachable; even being a child I recognized his needing to observe the custom as a sublime piece of
errant gallantry, and, being a fan of lost causes and misfits (Red Sox, Billy
Carter, The Dubliners) it brought me closer to him the full-on disaster of
him—now, if I had been, say, fifteen years old at the time, say, now that would
have been a completely different story: I would have been embarrassed out of my mind, but I was still a kid
and
Ireland is inextricably knit
with the skeins, the wool, the woolgathering memory of this particular outing,
ill-considered, madcap, and revelatory, the entire episode born of a two-way
cultural misunderstanding that had, at its green heart, something noble and
deferential; as I mentioned, my father never drank, the cocktail of medicines
he was required to ingest, including a rainbow of barbiturates (I know this
now) wouldn’t really allow him to drink safely and I’m sure the phenobarbital (the
sulks) and the corticosteroids (the rages) must have increased the effects of
the bender but there he is, like some Jewish Fergus, at the wheel of our brazen
car (did we wear seatbelts? I doubt it but what were we going to hit: the whole
place was peat bogs) I still did not know, at that point, when we were there
that my father was very sick (of course Fiddler’s
Green is a song about death) and dad had just been told that he hadn’t long
to live and that’s why the renovation and all the construction work and Bernie
Mahoney, to move him and mom upstairs away from us, my sister and I, to further
hide from us the evidence of the illness, to keep it one flight away, and also that’s (again, now I know) why we went to Ireland in the first place which is to
say one last jaunt a big yes to
death’s no and we had got there, to
that better-off place where one broods on
hopes and fear no more, for only a handful of hours, though not in the way
my father had imagined, (it’s never as you imagine it, nothing, ever), and
there was, of course, as there always is, a funk, after the inadvertent high
drunken revelry, and the trip on the plane back to the U.S. was painful both
emotionally, and for my dad, literally; literal pain that is he was in so much
pain
but as it turned out, he had longer to live than he had
been told; longer by some truly unhappy years, bad years—terrible for me for
sure, but he managed to live, albeit poorly, and times you couldn’t even call
it that, up until around that time when I was first to discover another Ireland, an Ireland of sorts (I took to it easily without prompting, as an inheritance) an Ireland of the page, that is, the true isle of sages
and saints of Yeats and Synge and Stephens, O’Casey, and Beckett and all of the
rest including of course Joyce, whose Ireland was no less an imagined Ireland
than my father’s or my own not to be pat but all of us excluded and expulsed and then repatriated all of which is
to say: was the trip, this trip, the trip what that any of us had hoped or
imagined it would be: No, nope, no it wasn’t, no.[i]
[i] Wrap me up in
me oilskins and jumper/No more on the docks I’ll be seen/Just tell me old
shipmates, I’m taking a trip, mates/And I’ll see you someday on Fiddler’s
Green.
