Daring (21 page)

The old woman offered me tea. I could hear soldiers kicking open the door of a nearby house; their shouts did not ruffle her. She turned up the volume on a recording of men singing Long Kesh Prison songs. Some safe house.

“What will you do if the soldiers come in here firing?” I asked her.

“Lie on me stomach!”

I started to shake. What happened to the boy with the bloody face? Surely, he died. What will happen to us? Fears gurgled up past the taut chest where I trapped my feelings. My throat burned. I was not a reporter now; I was a frightened child.
Please, God, throw me a lifeline
. I asked the old woman if I could use the phone. Yes, one call. I called Clay. My love would say the magic words to make the horror go away.

“Hi! How are you?” His voice was breezy; he was in bed in New York.

“I'm alive.”

“Good, how's the story coming?”

“Fourteen people were slaughtered here—”

“Hold on. CBS News is talking about Londonderry right now—”

“They're calling it Bloody Sunday.”

“Now look, you don't have to get in the front lines. You're doing a story on Irish women, remember that. Just stick with the women and stay out of trouble. Okay, honey?”

I was dumbstruck. For the first time, Clay didn't get it. My last wish for deliverance was squandered. As I joined the others lying on their stomachs, a powerful idea took hold
: No one is with me. No one can keep me safe. There is no one who won't ever leave me alone.

BEFORE BLOODY SUNDAY,
I had driven out of Belfast to look up my great-aunt Sarah. Actually, I was driven by an IRA commander who worked under Martin McGuinness, second in command of the Derry IRA. Once my guide realized we were going to Lisburn, he yelped, “That's the bloody headquarters of the British army!” Slamming on the brakes, this hard-bitten car bomber dove to the floor of the car. I couldn't help laughing. Taking over the wheel, I eventually found the ancestral home on Waterloo Road, a seventeenth-century stone farmhouse with a parlor draped in company slipcovers. At the kitchen door, the very fantasy of my great-aunt Sarah emerged from the scent of baking biscuits: a raspberry-cheeked, blue-eyed woman of considerable stature. Long widowed, she managed the modestly successful farm with paid farmers of her own.

“Och, it's Lillian's daughter, aren't you now?”

We were immediately family. As we sipped strong tea and nibbled her sweet biscuits, I was shocked to see a photograph of her deceased husband dressed as the leader of the local Orange Lodge. This is the Protestant-loyalist organization that perpetuated British rule and kept a boot at the throats of native Irish workers, treating them as the equivalent of blacks in the American South. With great trepidation, I asked my great-aunt if she was a supporter of the Orange Lodge.

“Och, no, it's a wicked way to run down your own kind,” she said. Aunt Sarah abhorred the long civil war in the North. She employed both Catholics and Protestants on her farm and fervently wished to live to see the Republic united, North with South. I was relieved that at least one of my forebears had rejected the path of violent repression. A woman, of course. But back then, in 1972, at the height of confrontation between Derry's Irish revolutionaries and Prime Minister Thatcher's militaristic response, I couldn't imagine that peace would ever end this centuries-old religious war. Martin McGuinness was twenty-one years old at the time of Bloody Sunday. Who would have thought that forty years later he would be deputy first minister of the parliament of Northern Ireland? The fearless women of Northern Ireland, like Aunt Sarah, would be the peacemakers. They would shame the men into giving up their guns and sitting at the table until they reached the Easter accord. But who could have foreseen that one day, in 2012, Queen Elizabeth herself would visit Northern Ireland and Martin McGuinness would take her white-gloved hand in his and bless her in Gaelic, “
Slan agus beannacht:
Good-bye and Godspeed.”

AFTER BLOODY SUNDAY,
I escaped Derry in a bumpy getaway car over pastureland and was more than grateful to see signs to Dublin. So was my photographer, Rima Shore, a Zionist at heart, who kept saying, “How the hell did I get mixed up in
your
war!” We checked into the Shelbourne Hotel and Rima disappeared into the bathtub. I met with our IRA contact in the lounge. Heavyset as a bar bouncer, he was all business. Given that I had a tape recording of Bloody Sunday, I was a valuable asset. In the seven-hundred-year war between the British and the Irish, there was no possible way of talking to both sides. Once under the protection of the IRA, one had to stick with the IRA. And after Bloody Sunday, the Republic was roiling with revolutionary fever.

The contact whispered in my ear. “Yer're not wantin' to stay here.” It was an English-owned hotel. “We might be doin' the Shelbourne tonight.”

“Doin'” meant bombing. I raced to the room and called to Rima in the tub. “I don't mean to torture you, but it's not over. We're on the run again.” While she scrambled to dress, I ran out to buy a bottle of strong Irish whisky and a chocolate cake. One always needs articles of appeasement. The next days and nights were a blur of mounting paranoia. We were led far out of town to another “safe house,” a deserted school with drawn shades. This was the hideout of Rita O'Hare, a young Belfast mom who shot a British soldier in her backyard.

“Rita Wild.” She introduced herself with her code name. Short with swirls of ginger hair and a rosebud smile, she looked harmless. She was a great interview. I heard the story of how she'd been protecting her husband while he made a getaway. She was shot in the hip, stomach, and head. As she lay in her backyard, she heard a British soldier shout, “Here's one of the bastards here, dead!” Another soldier cocked a rifle at her skull. All she could think to do was pull back her hood and say, “I'm a girl.” The soldiers kicked her in the head and dragged her into their vehicle and took her to Armagh prison. Awaiting a show trial certain to end in a severe sentence, she escaped and fled into the Republic.

Her nuclear family now consisted of her five-year-old son, Rory, and two IRA goons for protection. For our evening's entertainment, mother, child, and goons sang their favorite rebel songs:

It was Rory's birthday. I brought out the cake. Rita Wild told her little son to fetch a big knife. Moments later, I saw the boy sneaking up on Rima's back with a carving knife held like a dagger.

“Rory!” His mama stopped the boy but did not scold him. She was homeschooling him as a child soldier. When the goons showed us the room where we would all sleep together on the floor, I asked if they worried that Rory might get hold of their guns. Oh, no, they said, they slept on their guns.

“But the boy's always getting into the gelly,” one says.

Gelly?

Gelignite, the explosive commonly used by the IRA.

The appeal of a “safe house” was lost on me. I tried to sound polite in suggesting that we find a nearby inn to stay the night. Checking in did not go well. When I produced the license-plate number of the rented wreck, I was told I must see the manager. A dour man, he noted that the car had been rented from outside of the Republic. “You'll have to take it back to Belfast.”

On the run, again. We sprinted through a downpour to the rented wreck and screeched into the airport, left the car hot at the curb, and caught the next thing smoking out of Dublin for the United States. The plane pitched and tossed. Fingers kneaded rosaries. Crucifixes bobbed on trembling chests. The fear did not leave me for another year.

AFTER FLYING HOME FROM IRELAND,
I couldn't write the story. Every time I tried to listen to the carnage captured by my tape recorder, I felt the panic rise again. After a week of my evasions, Clay erupted in frustration: “If your story isn't in by noon, the ship is sailing without you.” He still didn't get it. I managed to drag out a routine story. My quick Irish temper served to overpower the panic attacks, but at a great price. Outbursts at those closest to me lengthened into diatribes, driving away the very people who could have helped me confront my fears.

As spring came, I hardly knew myself. The rootlessness that had been such joy in my early thirties, allowing me to burst the bonds of old roles, to be reckless and selfish and focused on roaming the world on assignments and then to stay up all night typing on caffeine and nicotine—all at once that didn't work anymore. Some intruder shook me by the psyche and shouted:
Take stock! Half your life has been spent. What about the part of you that wants a home and talks about a second child?
Before I could answer, the intruder pointed to something else I had postponed:
What about the side of you that wants to contribute to the world? Words, books, demonstrations, donations—is this enough? You have been a performer, not a full participant. And now you are thirty-four.

To be confronted for the first time with the arithmetic of life was, quite simply, terrifying.

SIX MONTHS LATER,
I had to travel to Miami Beach for the Democratic National Convention, July 1972. Maura was safely installed with her father for the week. Clay had persuaded me to stay with him at the Jockey Club (a friend described it as a high-class brothel, where they rang a bell at 5
A.M.
and everyone changed beds). I should have been filled with excitement at the chance to see and write about my first national political convention. Instead, when I found my lovebird dead, I burst into uncontrollable tears. I barely made the plane.

Flying had always been a joy to me. It was different now. Every time I went near a plane I saw a balcony in Northern Ireland and the boy I couldn't save. The fear of airplanes had blossomed into a phobia. I'd heard a weather report for Miami that contained the word
soupy
. From the safety of the entrance canopy, I called in to the pilot, “Have you had experience with instrument landings?” By now I had no shame. I asked for the aisle seat in the tail of the plane so that when we crashed, I would be the last one to see the ground.

I began to suspect that I was cracking up. I was overwhelmed with a sense of uprootedness. Well, yes, all the ins and outs and ups and downs with Clay; I'd had four different addresses in the previous two years. I couldn't even keep a lovebird alive. No sooner had I single-mindedly willed the 727 to clear Flushing Bay than the intruder was back:
You've done some good work, but what does it really add up to?

Too nervous to eat, what I didn't know is that a combat between two opposing medications, prescribed by different doctors, had begun in my gut. One was for a lingering intestinal flu, the other for the panic attacks after the Ireland trauma. Onto the angrily separating oils and waters of that digestive system, I threw champagne and cognac.

Clay was already at the convention commandeering his reporters. I let myself into our hotel room and decided to be mindlessly mechanical. Open the suitcase. But right there, a pair of red leather heels had bled onto a white skirt. Like the bloody socket of the boy's eye. I slammed the case shut. Listened to the radio. “Temperature eighty degrees in beautiful Boca Raton. Don't miss the eclipse tonight—but experts warn not to view the eclipse directly, to avoid permanent eye damage.”

That night, I was drawn to the balcony. With morbid fascination, I monitored the eclipse. Even the planet was suspended in an unstable condition between intervening forces of the universe. Heat lightning sparked off the towers of Miami Beach. The impulse was to let go and float with it. Parts of myself buried alive with an unreconciled father, severed husband, misplaced friends and loves heaped on me in a mass of fractured visions, all mixed up with the bloody head of the boy in Ireland.

Clay came back. I couldn't talk. I sat through the night on that balcony in Miami, trying to get a fix on the moon.

The next morning I called both doctors who had given me pills. I wanted a nice, neat medical explanation for the debilitating fears and mental confusion that had stricken me for the last half year, beginning with the Redpants blowback. The concept of posttraumatic stress syndrome was not yet recognized. Doctors confirmed that the two drugs (one a barbiturate, the other a mood elevator) were colliding in a violent chemical reaction. All I had to do was stay in bed for a day and wait for it to go away. But “it” was much bigger than that.

Around 8
P.M.
I snapped off the idiot box. It didn't go off. I passed in front of the TV set and bent over to pick up a chain-link belt. A hissing sound escaped from the set. I felt current sizzling through me. The shock knocked me over. I looked back. A jellyfish of fiendish hues was spreading across the screen. Was this a drug trip or was I coming undone?

The phone was in the other bedroom. It was beyond the window wall with its balcony hung over the water. Black water sliced by silver knives. The sliding doors were open. Wind sucked at the curtains. Suddenly, I was afraid to walk past that window wall. If I so much as went near that balcony, I would lose my balance and go over the edge. I crouched down. Crablike, I inched across the gaping room. I tried to tell myself this was ridiculous. But when I stood, my limbs went wobbly. The thought persisted,
If only I can reach the right person, this nightmare will go away.

Ireland could be explained. Real bullets had threatened my life from the outside. My fears were appropriate. Now the destructive force seemed to be inside me. I was my own event. I could not escape it. Something alien, unspeakable but undeniable, had begun to inhabit me.