Jaywalking with the Irish (5 page)

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.

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.

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“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:

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.

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.

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