The Music Lesson (3 page)

“Is this Patricia Dolan?”

“Speaking.”

“The Patricia Dolan who is the daughter of Peter Dolan?”

“Yes—is something wrong with Pete? Is he all right? Has something happened?”

“No, not at all, not at all.” This was when I noticed the Irish accent. “This is yer cousin, then, Patricia Dolan. Michael O’Driscoll is my name, and we’re cousins.”

“Where are you calling from, Michael?” Relieved now, I was curious. He sounded young. I envisioned a student with a knapsack, run away from university, seeking his fortune in America.

“The call box in the park, just across Fifth Avenue from yer very grand Frick Collection,” he said. “I was hopin’ you could come away out of there and we could have a cup of tea and a chat. I haven’t got the price of admission, and anyway, I don’t know how to find you in with the books.”

He
was
young—sixteen years younger than I—with a deceptive baby face. Piercing blue eyes, like Pete’s, not mine—I’ve got my mother’s topaz brown eyes—met my gaze each time I turned to glance at him as we walked the few blocks up Madison Avenue to eat at E.A.T. (It’s a casual but outrageously expensive restaurant, so I figured I would treat. I have an irrational love of the place, an addictive relationship to the bread sticks, and I cherish any opportunity to glimpse a certain famous writer with
a long white braid who lives in the neighborhood, occupying a corner table, furtively supplementing her meal with take-out soup from the coffee shop across the street.)

Michael O’Driscoll didn’t have the traditional “map of Ireland” kind of features and coloring, yet there was something subtly Irish about his face. An amused wariness. Our hair was almost the same color—a beigy no color. He needed a haircut. We were about the same height, which is to say I’m slightly tall for a woman and he’s slightly short for a man. In a passing shop window, I noted the symmetry of our matching reflections. We could have been brother and sister.

When he smiled, which he did frequently, his eyes crinkled and he looked a decade older than he did in the brief moments when his face was between expressions and he looked like anybody and nobody.

His clothes weren’t exactly shabby, but his corduroys and flannel shirt and sweater, while clean, showed signs of wear. He had an easy, surefooted stride, a grace, really, yet he was very watchful, somehow very careful, taking everything in as we walked.

He occupied the space beside me in a way that suddenly reminded me of someone I knew and had had a slight crush on years ago, Rick something, an Outward Bound guide from Seattle whom I met a few times when a college friend who had gone out with him was showing
him around New York. Now there was a man who seemed capable of anything at all. Rick Green. He had such alertness and interest in his surroundings, and this same appraising wariness.

Rick clearly regarded the streets of New York as, quite literally, a concrete jungle, and he had to be talked out of a caving expedition to explore a disused portion of the BMT subway line. Sometimes I meet men who remind me of Rick and I picture him again for a moment, tackling the wilderness of New York with his earnest West Coast skills, rappelling down the Seagram Building, weaving a hammock under the trees in Central Park out of a spool of dental floss, cooking a meal over a flaming copy of the
Daily News
. I do love competence in a man.

On the way to the restaurant, Michael O’Driscoll told me to call him Mickey, and by the second corner we had sorted through the O’Driscolls and figured how it was that we were related. Strangely enough, right up to that moment, it had never occurred to me in any real way that I had contemporary relations in Ireland. Which is really odd, now that I think about it, given all the passion about Irish politics in my family. It might have had something to do with my grandfather Paddy’s being so cut off from his parents only a short couple of generations out of Ireland.

Between my father and my grandfather, what I knew of my Irish family history seemed all in the past. My thoughts about Ireland in the present had been, right up to this moment, entirely mythic, entirely political. And theoretical. In light of where I sit as I write these words, it’s almost impossible to believe, but that’s how it was. My Irish relations existed as daguerreotypes in my head. Mickey’s sudden appearance was almost shocking, like something from a movie, as if an ancestor had risen from the grave and come to call and now we were walking up Madison Avenue together, having a chat.

Mickey told me that he had grown up in the village of Rosscarbery, in County Cork, before leaving to attend Trinity College in Dublin—the first family member to do so, he said with pride—and he seemed pleased that my automatic response was to identify Rosscarbery as the birthplace of O’Donovan Rossa and Michael Collins.

“You’ve been home, of course?”

“Never.”

“A sin you’ll soon have to rectify,” Mickey said merrily as he held the door to E.A.T. open for me. Two girls of about twelve in Nightingale-Bamford uniforms ducked under his arm as if they owned the world, and Mickey caught my eye and we grinned at each other over their heads before we went inside.

That sort of moment is rarely easy for me. Katie
would be eight now. Would she be reading the
Little House
books? Rollerblading? Agitating for pierced ears? She had just started piano lessons.

Mickey said something as we waited to order about how glad he was to have been able to find me. I said something about how I was glad, too, while privately noting an almost giddy feeling of overwhelming relief at his presence, as if I had been expecting him for a long time—the way, at La Guardia, when I’m waiting for Pete to come in on the shuttle, I keep scanning the faces of strangers until finally one of the strangers turns into Pete.

At that moment sitting with Mickey, waiting for our food, I felt something I hadn’t felt for a long time—it was a sense of not being alone. No, it was more than that. I felt safe.

It didn’t occur to me to question how he had managed to locate me at work—on reflection, the more likely thing would have been a call to Pete or a message on my machine, since Pete’s listed in Boston and I’m in the Manhattan phone book.

I’ve since learned that information is one of Mickey’s specialties. And, of course, I know now that Mickey was not looking for Pete; he was looking for me.

Over soup and bread—some days I don’t feel up to the lofty conversation at the elaborate and formal staff
lunch at the Frick, and this had been one of those days, so I’d had a yogurt at my desk, with a few pages of an Iris Murdoch novel,
The Sea, the Sea
—“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats” being an important nugget of wisdom therefrom—Mickey told me that he was on his first visit to America and he was feeling like an idiotic “toorist.” He was here for six weeks, he said, having come because there was a slim chance at landing an apprenticeship doing fine cabinetry with an Irish guy he knew who had emigrated from Kilkenny and now operated a hugely successful workshop in SoHo. (I had, in fact, recently seen an article about the workshop in the Sunday
New York Times.
)

He said he was staying in a flat in Rego Park, Queens, which belonged to a school friend of his who worked for Aer Lingus. When I smiled at that—at all of it, not just the “flat” but also the grand tone he lent to “Rego Park” and “Queens”—Mickey touched my wrist and laughed and corrected himself, calling it an “apartment” with a ridiculous fake American twang. By pastries and coffee, I had fallen in love. I think it took Mickey a little longer than that.

Of course, he knew all about me. He knew, for instance, that I had never traveled to Ireland. He knew everything. I suppose I should be furious that over the next days and weeks he let me tell him in my own way in
my own time about my growing up, my motherless childhood, all about Paddy and Pete, and then my college years, my work, Sam, Katie, the accident, and about the one brief and not terribly successful relationship I had had (pathetically, with a married visiting lecturer in art history at Columbia, who came to see me about some slides) in the empty time from then to now, all of which he knew.

I suppose, too, that I should have been more suspicious of Mickey’s vague plans for using his time in New York, his complete flexibility around my work schedule, his total availability, his lack of plans at Christmas. His devotion from the outset to his long-lost third cousin once removed. What can I say? I was distracted.

Mickey insists that falling in love with me was never part of the plan. But he also insists he fell hard, like a ton of bricks (an obscure Irish expression, he thought, charmingly, that I might not know). Never mind that it started as a complete setup.

“Forty-one, Patricia. I can’t believe it at all. Look at you. You’ve been sealed up in some kind of cryogenic storage. In West Cork, the women have no teeth of their own by forty-one, they have chin whiskers, their dugs are down to their waists, they’ve dried up completely,” he said. “When I thought to look up me fancy New York cousin, I never thought I’d be gattlin’ after you. I thought
you’d remind me of me mam, or me granny, or Sister Margaret from school. She was a terror, that one.”

These remarks, uttered on our third or fourth night together, might have offended me had they not been murmured by Mickey as he lay sprawled in my bed, idly tracing a line down my bare hip with one intoxicating fingertip.

I
had
been in cold storage, until Mickey. How can I explain what it is about him? How can I describe the attraction in words? It feels so primitive at times that I am almost afraid of it—it, my desire for him, my obsession. Mickey has changed me. Everything has been rearranged.

Years ago, I saw a television documentary about heart transplants that fascinated me. The donor heart, which has been kept on ice, is warmed up and placed inside the chest where the diseased heart had been moments before. After hours of surgery, the moment of truth comes when the clamps are removed and blood flows into this new heart, which has been chilled and still for several hours. Warmed by the circulating blood, the heart slowly begins to do what a heart is meant to do—it starts to beat again.

Some of my best early memories are of sitting on my father’s lap with my head against his chest, leaning against him, not content simply to listen to his voice travel through the air into my ears but also loving to feel it vibrate all through me as he told Irish stories—history
and legends and folktales and family myths all jumbled together. Pete told me about Brian Boru. I was lulled at bedtime with the Battle of the Boyne. At seven, I learned about Michael Collins and the wars with the Black and Tans and the Easter Rising, all in one long night when I was up with the misery of chicken pox. I was forever being told about my own blood, the Dolans and the O’Driscolls. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about the Great Hunger, the terrible famine that began in 1846 and was utilized by the British to rid the Irish landscape of my ancestors.

I learned about the playful, magical side of Ireland as well, about fairies, ring forts, Celtic gold turning up under farmers’ plows, the way stone circles and standing stones sprout on the misty hills like toadstools. I tried to believe that Saint Patrick really did lead all the snakes away. I learned that part of being Irish is having a deep relationship with history writ large and small. We rarely forgive, and we never forget.

And from my father I learned how it is that for the Irish, beauty and sadness and greed and bravery and passion and cruelty must at times go together.

And then Mickey came along. How can I find the words for what this is for me? Not only ordinary lust, not only loneliness and opportunity made this happen, though those things were part of it. Mickey has come to me out of the blue as the living embodiment of all of
Pete’s ideologies and mythologies. How could I resist that? Why would I even want to? And the sex is astonishing.

My father’s great-grandfather, one Michael Dolan, left the West Cork village of Leap—that’s about eight miles from here on the Skibbereen road—at age twenty to escape the famine. It was 1848. He landed in Canada and settled outside Halifax, where he was a reasonably successful farmer, married a local girl (named Margaret Daly, or Bailey, depending on which records you trust, origin unknown) and had three daughters and one son. My father’s grandfather Vincent Dolan also married a Nova Scotia girl, Maureen O’Driscoll from Sydney, whose father, Joseph O’Driscoll from Skibbereen, had sailed from Queenstown (Cobh, today) on the same coffin ship as Vincent’s father.

They had six children, four of whom perished in a flu epidemic in 1907; only the oldest children, twins, survived. My grandfather Paddy Dolan was called up to fight for England on a French battlefield in the Great War, while his younger brother Teddy—younger by ten minutes—stayed home to work the farm. Paddy came back with a war wound and a pregnant war bride, my grandmother Rose Thornton, an English nurse who thought she had married some approximation of a prosperous Yank.

This match was not acceptable to the Dolan clan, who did not make them welcome. Teddy, who would never have gotten himself into a mess with some tart of an English Protestant, was given the farm. (In the end, he died a lonely bachelor, and what was left of the farm was razed twenty years ago for a housing development. Teddy’s will—surely he was holding up his end of some soul-crushing deal with his parents—left everything to the Catholic church.) Too proud to stay, Paddy and Rose sailed immediately for Boston, where my father, their only child, was born at the height of a brutal heat wave in a third-floor walk-up tenement in South Boston. It was 1918.

Soon, Paddy found a few familiar faces among the Irish community, and after some menial jobs, he eventually became a policeman—truly a Paddy on the beat, though his brogueless Canadian “ehs” were a peculiarity. Rose never got over the unexpected hardness of her life. She more or less took to her bed—into which, it would seem, as they had no more children, Paddy was rarely invited—for the rest of her life. Rose Dolan died of heart failure when my father, Pete, was still in grade school. She had stopped living long before. My father doesn’t often speak about his mother.