Jaywalking with the Irish (10 page)

All three seeds had been transplanted to new soil, and now our fates hung on how they would take.

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Inevitably, new rhythms took hold. Each morning Laura rose on her own at six, made tea, and dressed for school. A few minutes later, Jamie would start fixing breakfast and packing lunches. Around 7:15 I’d take Laura down to Cork’s hideously Stalinesque bus station for her hour-long journey to Bandon, with a transfer at the far end, the same taxing trip to be repeated at the end of her school day, which sometimes lasted until 6 p.m. After dinner, the homework was stacked higher than she had ever seen before. Until now, she’d bicycled or been protectively driven the three short miles to her Connecticut school without the slightest worry, her every care looked after. Suddenly, every commonplace security was gone. Remarkably, this girl, who’d only just turned twelve, was too excited to complain. Laura’s self-confidence amazed us. Hers was a vision of a child maturing before our eyes.

Returning from the bus station each morning, I would hear a revelry bugle wafting from the nearby military barracks to rouse the more tender souls of the Irish army. Peculiarly, it would often sound four more times over the next hour, sometimes with bagpipes mixed in, the local soldiery evidently being a more sleepy bunch than our young daughter.

By now, the boys would be waking for their sweet cereal, packed, like so many other confections in Ireland, with at least twice the sugar punch of its counterparts in America – which may have something to do with why the Irish talk so much. Just before nine, we’d escort Harris and Owen through a sentry gate to the walled officers’ compound of the army barracks, then down past leafy, bird-song-rich lanes and playing fields where the dew sparkled in the sun. By the time we reached their school’s back gate, the world was fresh.

Owen loved his first-grade teacher, and Harris was relieved to discover that his classroom was not the house of horrors he had feared – not yet. No sooner would one of us ferry them home around 3 p.m. than the super-charged doorbell commenced splitting eardrums as their eager new friends called to play in the garden.

About an hour later, I’d often watch from my top-floor office window high above as the duo of crisp-strewing malcontents, now often joined by an immense friend, began their afternoon’s slink down our lane, sometimes crawling as if seeking invisibility, for a new afternoon’s installment of sniggering and menace toward the youngsters playing on the other side of the hedge. With newspaper stories constantly circulating about the sometimes ugly treatment of dark-skinned asylum seekers in this island of the welcomes, we should have grasped by now that there were elements of Irish society that abhor outsiders of every kind, and in fact savor the challenge of trying to scare them back to wherever they come from. But we didn’t.

For a while, we merely tried to ignore the creeping and crawling things outside. Our boys, for their part, were scarcely troubled, so long as they played on the right side of the protective gate.

In the evenings they were kept busy anyhow memorizing the principal towns of the twenty-six counties and all the exotic river and mountain names of the Republic, or in Owen’s case, learning to say “dog” in Irish. Sometimes they grew snappish, one or the other joining with a new friend in an abusive “slag fest” – a prime Irish sport – insulting their sister or brother to curry favor with the ever-shifting allegiances outside our door.

“Don’t you understand how important it is that we stand together as a family over here?” Jamie or I would scold. Nice words, but they fell on deaf ears. In truth, there were bitter fights about first goes at jams, juice, butter, bread, biscuits, toothpaste, television, and maddeningly short shower times before the heater conked out – the typical fodder of parent hell.

But mostly our problems seemed minor, even if I was worried about not yet having harnessed the same volume of work assignments that always seemed to materialize back home. True, I had
my occasional website feature column as the guru of new developments in the medical device industry, but arrangements for the next big ticket newsletter were falling on deaf ears – and, alas, the magazine and newspaper work I had counted on rekindling was, shall we say, materializing “slowly.” Too often, I found myself sitting at my desk and staring at the far hills in hopes of inspiration or at least a ringing phone. The process became something of a pantomime. The light changed so constantly that one had to circle the room again and again, like a caged cat, to open and close shades and switch lamps off and on to cope with the baffling transitions from filmy gray to strange shimmer, followed by floods of heavenly brilliance, and then back through the kaleidoscope once more.

But Ireland remains rightly famous for its infinite avenues of procrastination. So Jamie and I solved early anxieties by enjoying some leisurely lunches, pretending we were on an idyll in, oh, say Provence. A couple of the nicest were savored at the nearby Arbutus Lodge, a stately nineteenth-century inn with a veranda over a tranquil garden descending toward the grain elevators that rise up like tin porkpie hats over the River Lee. The food was excellent: roasted chicken and shallots and what appeared to be leeks landslided beneath creamy garlic potatoes, washed down with a tasty New Zealand chardonnay. Another afternoon saw us picking at wholesome salads in the balcony restaurant above the downtown English Market, which is a gloriously colorful, vaulted-roof arcade wherein earthy butchers and fish-beheaders man stalls beside petite sellers of Brie. Ghoulish monkfish and sole; blood-red slabs of beef and fowl hanging limply from scrawny necks; stacks of sweetly scented bread; vegetables and fruits just in from Kenya and Spain; local cheeses from West Cork; fresh Italian pastas; Lebanese olives; Israeli artichokes; and Skippy peanut butter – you can buy a mouthwatering array of foodstuffs from the booths in that emporium. Indeed, one can eat infinitely better in Ireland than was possible even ten years ago. One can feast, and until we got the hang of how much we were actually spending, we did.

It was hard not to celebrate. So one evening of that first week of school, I brought Harris with me to a lake in an abandoned limestone quarry in North Cork for a little fishing. Mostly he was
captivated by the task of rowing a rented boat, as if he was the one steering our family ship of state forward. In the rosy light, one fat trout after another surfaced to take my flies, and I let Harris reel them in. In Ireland, big fish have always cast a mystical wake; ancient Irish poets used to lie for hours in remote river pools seeking wisdom from the bubbles released by passing salmon. Their breath exuded knowledge of the godhead.

“Are you happy here?” I asked as we climbed back into the car.

“You mean sitting in a car?” he responded, always wry.

“You know what I mean.”

“Ah sure, it’s grand,” Harris said, proud of the new expressions he was picking up.

I probed. “Not everything is going to be grand, you understand that?”

“Well, I miss Robert. Most of all I miss catching snakes with him and exploring the woods, and I don’t like it that there’s no snakes or woods outside our door.”

“I can understand that. But you’ve got so much else, so many new friends, and for the rest of your life you are going to be a larger person for having experienced what is happening now. It’s going to be difficult sometimes, but when things bother you, just tell me, and we can try to fix them together.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” he said and abruptly offered a hug.

A sweet silence fell over our trip back to Cork City – there was love in it.

Things were going so swimmingly, I received sanction for another Friday afternoon visit to the Hi-B as September waned. Voilà, I instantly gained a stool at the front ranks of the Cork senate, and there my education continued. Apparent, it soon became, that the cantankerous Brian O’Donnell was far from the only star attraction in this place, because the pints de jour this afternoon were being poured by a woman with an opposite, boundlessly warm nature – Esther.

Never had I seen a more engaging bartender. Discreet enquiries quickly revealed that every afternoon two-dozen men or more wander into the Hi-B simply to be cheered for a pick-me-up or two
by Esther’s rollicking charisma. Some stay longer, and one could easily understand why. Here, the regulars whispered, was a woman who always appreciates and never scolds or asks one to take out the garbage – the male dream.

There must have been some kick in that first pint, because I became instantly enraptured. A painter, I thought, could exhaust his palette in portraying Esther’s long brown streaks of hair falling nonchalantly from either side of a jolly moon face, and her glowing blue eyes, never tainted by a ripple of hostility. No supermodel, I would learn, captures as much attention as Esther does every day.

Fresh customers inquired, one after another, “May I have a pint of Guinness?”

“Of course you can, love,” was her invariable response, regardless of whether they had been seen before.

Time drifted, and I heard three different men ask her to run away with them for the weekend.

“I don’t believe running is something you should undertake without a medic,” Esther chortled, which was gracious considering the appearance of some of her suitors. She said that her boyfriend, Toss, of these last eighteen years wouldn’t bother being jealous – “not with the customers I serve here,” Esther roared.

Suddenly, a certain velvet-voiced gent made his presence felt in the bar. By now, I’d learned that half the adult population of Ireland shared an obsession with this crooner, whose insouciant, seductive tones emanate from every third pub, shoe shop, and bank. “Nel Blu Di Pinto Di Blu – Volare, oh, oh, oh!” Those were the immortal words echoing now through the Hi-B, where Dean Martin, R.I.P., rather than the viper-vanquishing Patrick, seemed to be regarded as Hibernia’s true patron saint. The Las Vegas Brat Pack boy may be enjoying a brief posthumous surge of attention in various countries, but his boozy aura clearly reigned supreme over Ireland. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was all but forgotten, although his portrait had once reigned in every Irish foyer, along with companion ones of the pope and Jesus, the latter with an exposed, and often electronically illuminated, giant red heart. Now it’s Dino Crocetti who croons eternally in the let-the-good-times-roll soul
of the modern Emerald Isle, with a fag in his lips, a drink in his hand, and a girl on his arm – the way every other Irishman would like to carry on to the day he dies.

I’d tasted the Hi-B’s seductive fruits before, but nobody had warned me about what was coming next. Here now was Esther, who never touched the booze or nicotine herself, crooning giddily “Little Ole Wine Drinker, Me” and “Memories are Made of This.” Suddenly a half-dozen customers began belting out in unison, “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie – that’s
amore
!”

Merriment washed through the place in waves. An irresistible smile spread across the small face of Jimmy Cosgrave, a former butcher close on eighty and a classic of the ever-amiable, retired gentleman-laborer type still ubiquitous in Ireland. Jimmy, dressed to the nines in a white shirt, tie, and suspenders under a neatly pressed jacket, proved good for a few pints – until his wife gently steered him toward the door. Geezers in Florida beach-chairs do not have it so good.

Sitting close to the pay phone into which he incessantly dumped coins for brief, cackling calls to mysterious contacts, presided the Hi-B’s resident sculptor, John Burke. “Burkie” had an inimitably gruff voice so rasped with drink and cigarettes that it sounded like it emanated from a clanging boiler stationed hundreds of feet down in his torso. The son of a Tipperary IRA hitman known as “Two Gun Thady,” Burkie soon showed himself to be a softie at heart.

In his younger years, he was acclaimed for massive abstract sculptures in the Calder mold. Fellows at the bar now sniggered that as soon as one of these was installed at the grassy center of one particular Cork roundabout near the airport, numerous drivers dialed “999” to report the wreckage of a fresh plane crash. Nowadays, Burkie tended to work on intricate tabletop constructions, as the money for the kind of big projects that he favored had grown tight.

“You come from a strange nation,” offered Burkie, with dark sunglasses obscuring his mischievous eyes.

When Burkie said something was bizarre, I quickly learned, it was stone guaranteed. “I mean where else would you get pornographic ice cubes?”

No argument there.

“I used to love a bar in Manhattan called Maggies. It was just off Fifth Avenue somewhere. There was this Jewish fellow in there named Bob Goldman who once asked me what time it was. I looked at my watch and said ‘Half five.’ He says, ‘Half five is two thirty.’ Christ, didn’t he have a point?”

“Nice one,” I said.

“That was how we hit off, like. He took me up to the top of the Pan Am building and the next thing you know he’s packing me into a helicopter and we’re flying all around the fecking Big Apple half-cocked. After a while we came down again and had some more drink. Then he says he’s taking me to New Jersey, where he lives. So I said, fine. We drove his car onto the Staten Island ferry.”

“The what?” I asked, remembering the geography differently.

“The Staten Island ferry. I just told you. Anyway, Bob has this flash car with a driver and we head off down these huge highways. Then we stop in front of some factory and he says, ‘I have this bunch of assholes working for me and I have to check that they’re still awake.’ There were all these Vietnamese or some goddam thing hunched over conveyor belts and an enormous machine in the back throbbing and belching exhaust and shooting out endless pink ice cubes shaped like tits with little ice nipples on them. I said, ‘Holy Mother of Mercy, what’s this, Bob?’”

Burkie was cackling, sipping, and furiously sucking on a cigarette. “‘Everybody loves porno ice cubes in the clubs these days,’ says Bob. Then he throws a switch and out come pink ice cubes shaped like girls’ asses, thousands and thousands of them. I said, ‘Bob, do you have anything for the homos?’ and he throws another switch and out come thousands of iced pricks.”

“Tell me you’re making this up,” I said.