Jaywalking with the Irish (11 page)

“How could you? How can you not love America when it’s capable of things like this? Then he tells me we’re going to a Halloween party in some club and gets me to dress up like Richard Nixon. And guess what kind of ice cubes were in every glass?”

“What town did this happen in?”

“I told you, New Jersey,” Burkie responded.

A silver-haired man exuberantly joined our conversation. He
had an extraordinarily lilting voice, the kind that Cork people use to singsong their way giddily through everyday speech, as if swinging happily through some diphthong-ridden forest of their imagination. The one declaiming so exuberantly now was a jazz pianist who presided over rollicking, impromptu sessions in the pub every Wednesday night. He was but a month old the first time his mother ushered him into the Hi-B so she could chat to friends who were taking a break from their shopping.

“I liked the place so much, I’ve come back for seventy years,” the musician laughed.

“And we’re wondering when the hell you’ll ever leave!” Esther chortled. Then she leaned closer, saying, “Dave, this is Dick O’Sullivan. He’s a
dote
.”

This was high praise, because being called a “dote” in Ireland is an epiphany, a verbal halo. The word is untranslatable, not only into foreign tongues but also into English. It has to do, obviously, with being doted upon. But in Ireland, women – it is always women – take the verb and suffuse it with so much loving emotion that the word becomes burnished into a noun of all-encompassing affection. The replenishing of reality with wellsprings of warmth is of course what Irish women do all day long, thereby preventing the country from turning into a madhouse of nonstop homicidal bickering. After all, the most celebrated of ancient Celts in the eighth-century
Tain
manuscript, the boy-warrior Cuchulainn, a.k.a. “The Hound of Ulster,” merrily lopped off the heads of about two thousand rivals, often for a single comment that displeased him.

“Oh, your daughter’s nearly a teenager, is she? Well, good luck,” offered Dick. “Maybe you’ve heard about the American, the Englishman, and the Kerryman who had the same problem,” he said, proceeding to offer a rollicking off-color joke about the blindness of fathers toward developmental changes in their daughters.

By now, my head was spinning, yet my thoughts were already fixed on the idea that I could never leave Cork. At that moment, a narrow-eyed old geezer sat down on a stool and started rummaging at his side. “Esthaher!” he wheezed with his head drooping in dismay. “I’m sorry but I seem to have no money.”

“Ah, not to worry John, I’ll pour your pint and you can pay me another time,” the patron saint of Cork smiled.

A moment later, John wheezed again, “Esthaher, I have no pockets. They’re all gone.”

Esther’s devilish eyes now flashed the length of the suddenly gone-speechless bar. The geezer took a long quaff and, with lips rimmed in stout cream, stood up to head for the gent’s. Only then did it become apparent that he had put his pants on backward. Laughter unto tears rained.

The time now was about 4:30, although it had begun slipping, slipping. A friend of Dick O’Sullivan’s arrived, sipped, and commenced belting out an aria from Puccini, his eyes closing soulfully and his right hand lifting as if he were on the stage at Covent Garden and not standing unaccompanied in the middle of a bar where neither sanity nor sobriety is held in high regard. And why not sing? It was Friday after all, the flagship of the seven most appealing days of the Irish week, and the September sun, whose future appearances were likely to be scarce, was yet shining.

Brian O’Donnell slipped in, his fussy prosecutorial eyes darting about for miscreants as he helped himself to a prodigious brandy. He happened to train his glare upon me.

“I see you are further acquainting yourself with the asylum,” Brian winked. “Ah, I think you’d better watch that fella beside you. He may claim to be a Richard, but he’s been a Dick all his life.”

A change of music, and the bar began to levitate to the strains of a brass section muscling into a bout of Wagner, with Brian waving his imaginary baton at the crescendo.

What a place. “I’m at the Hi-B and it’s mad fun with a cast of characters you wouldn’t believe, but I’ll be home soon,” I told Jamie over the phone, possibly without registering the desired effect.

But then I hadn’t figured out that the clock on the Hi-B’s wall was dangerously defective, as indeed are baffling numbers of Irish timepieces – every street corner clock in Cork tells a different time, just like the Liar’s Tower. At that point, the Hi-B’s hour hand hadn’t yet climbed to six, and the world still resembled the one I had left at the bottom of the stairs. I met a roguish carpenter named Kieran to whom I warmed instantly; a statuesque Mary Louise;
and several Denises who began to blend into a single composite grinning Denis.

Lo now, there was Owen McIntyre suddenly bursting in with marvelous stories broadcast in his Donegal birdsong, in fact a raving monologue that seemed, as usual, to be launched rather than spoken from his lips. This saga had something to do with a fellow with a “savage” appetite for a “fierce” woman with “deadly” looks and a “mighty” wit, which energized the suitor’s “massive” thirst along with thoughts about something “shocking.” But the punch line was lost in his inevitable digressions. I told him I had a “wicked” need to go home for dinner.

“Come here to me,” Owen said, which, even in my waning condition, obviously signaled an invitation to shut up. “You have plenty of time to make it back for dinner now – it will be at least twenty hours until the next one – so you might as well have another pint.”

There are reasons why Irish people are not always punctual. The ritual of shared pint-buying is sometimes part of it. This rite never, ever comes in ones, but always in units of two. If you accept the first offer, as any polite soul must, but do not return the favor in an equal and opposite amount soon, you will be blackguarded for the rest of your days in whatever pub your ass has been parked. So we had a deuce times two.

“What we are doing here is not about drinking per se,” Owen suddenly explained.

I stared in consternation at the various twenty-ounce glasses arrayed before us – drained, working, and due up next. It didn’t seem like we were nibbling hors d’oeuvres.

“Drink is nothing more than opening a door,” he started again.

To a flight of stairs I am about to fall down, I thought.

The talk, which flowered and digressed in all directions, was not easy to walk away from, until my wandering gaze discovered the clock’s hour hand just completing its fifth revolution since the last spot-check. Where was Father Theobold Mathew when one needed him?

The taxi driver I found on Patrick Street did a good impersonation
of that celebrated scold. “Do you know about the three stages of the Irish drunk?” he asked as I amiably swayed beside him in the front seat – in Cork, it is disrespectful for passengers to retreat to the back of a taxi and impede the flow of nonstop wisdom from the lips of the driver.

“I don’t actually.”

“The peacock, the monkey, and the pig.”

“Sorry?”

“They all start as peacocks and turn into monkeys and the pig comes rooting around after.”

“But I thought monkeys were a barrel of fun?”

“For a while, but they have to be watched closely because they will turn into pigs in a flash.”

“How does one spot the change?”

“When they begin pissing in alleyways, and fighting for no reason, and vomiting on their shoes, they are pigs. Take a close look at the behavior of the young people of Ireland now and you will see the impact of two hundred years of a nation being continually jarred.”

Charming. “I gather you’re not fond of the drink yourself,” I said as the bright lights of MacCurtain Street finally dimmed behind us, and I began to weigh the euphoric sense of discovery that informed my last sips in the Hi-B with the sour truths that were yanking down the drooping lobes of my formerly contented ears.

“Oh, I am,” said the taxi man. “But I drink alone, at the farthest possible end of my local bar whose name I won’t tell you and where you will never find me anyway.”

Who would want to, I thought, fumbling for change as he came to a stop.

For some reason, my key and the front door lock exchanged greetings clumsily. But I pasted on a happy face and tacked with high hopes down the hallway into the ominously clean and silent kitchen, at the far end of which I discovered my wife scowling from a chair. Talk about adapting to our new land. She might as well have been rocking impatiently before an open hearth with a rosary bitterly twisting in her hands.

“I met the greatest people, especially Owen,” I started, smiling perhaps as slackly as some other customers had done while evacuating the Hi-B hours earlier. This was no time for moral equivocation, so I steadied my feet. “I really feel we made the right choice in coming here. Our lives are going to work out great.”

“That’s good, because I was just reading a short story,” Jamie said, “and it reminded me of your behavior tonight.”

“Really?”

“Yes, it was about a man whose wife had just given birth to a baby boy. The midwife sent him out to get fresh towels. But he was so excited that on the way he stopped in at the local pub to tell all his friends the news. Everyone was so happy for him that they bought him drinks and he bought some back. At some point, he remembered that he was supposed to be on an errand, but he was too far gone to remember the thread. So he left with some coins in his hands and stopped in at the shop next door. When he got home he called up the stairs to announce his purchase. ‘Honey, I’m back! I got the fish!’”

“At least he returned with something,” I said, wondering if I had left a haddock at the Hi-B.

Return to beginning of chapter

The perfect antidote for bedtime sourness is to aim for higher altitudes in the morning, so the family, on some expedition or other every weekend, was wrested to search for an ascent into Waterford’s Comeragh Mountains, irresistibly called the “Magic Road.” Contacts from the night before had vowed that we would see things there that would turn our heads as they never had been before. Of course, in Ireland, people will promise whatever falls onto their lips.

The blurry assurances had something to do with sheer waterfalls, celestial mountainscapes, and gravity running in reverse. Well, wasn’t that the point of our moving to Ireland? The family was dubious as we left the garish seaside stucco palaces of Waterford’s tony Gold Coast, hard by the evidently drossly inferior Copper Coast, and struggled through various twists and turns in the hinterlands. At last we came to a shop at a remote crossroads whose astonishingly wrinkled proprietor offered nearly indecipherable praises of the day’s light. “There’s a rare might to it, that’s for sure,” said he.

The shop had a surreal quality, perhaps owing to the clouds of steam billowing out of a side door to the man’s living quarters. Thence emerged the pungent odor of boiling cabbage and one could imagine the grinning cat face of a Mary Osborne look-alike stirring a cauldron on an ancient hearth somewhere in the next rooms.

More curious, however, was the place’s merchandise, so threadbare and ancient that it looked as if it had been stocked via bicycle basket by a distributor from Flann O’Brien Grocers. The front shelves offered balls of string, tins of custard, and small vials of castor oil and glycerine, the latter old enough to have had their
labels soaked through with untold years of exudations from under their caps. These goodies gave way to small clusters of canned peas and kippers, each ingredient separated from its fellows by generous foot-long empty spaces coated in historic accretions of dust. At the back stood a bin of dirt-encrusted carrots, every specimen so miserably stunted, leathery, and aged as to be perfect for making Bun’s carrot whiskey.

But the most intriguing item was the proprietor’s face, gap-toothed and spectacularly weathered from what must have been decades spent in the surrounding mountains chasing sheep. The
1892 Annals of the Cork Historical Society
describe a character named Tom Green with a very similar mien:

Our present Tom Green was asked if there truly were any unusual gravity doings in the mountains above his shop. This fired a gleam
of excitement into his deeply socketed eyes. “There most certainly is a strange power up there. It is enough to make a car run backward up the hill. And just think about the mighty weight in a car! How this can be, no one can explain, but it happens every time and you could set a watch to it, although of course time then would be going backward too, which might not be a bad thing, if you think about that. You just go up this road out here where the sign says Mahon Falls. Climb on past the cottages until you reach the high ground. Then you come to a cattle grid and, beyond that a small push, a white thorn tree with all kinds of trinkets in it. Stop beside it and go in neutral, and you’ll see.”

The narrow track wound into ever wilder country, framed by astonishing canyon-like expanses that resembled the Dakota Badlands. But there lay the grid in the road, and a moment later the scraggly thorn tree, festooned with colored strings and odd patches of cloth, waited at the bottom of a slight but definite incline. Silence reigned on this Magic Road of wind, stone, and gorse. “Will we be going airborne now, Dad?” smirked Laura as I halted the car, shifted to neutral, and prepared to roll onward. Nothing happened – for a second – but at least we did not go forward. But then, this one-ton station wagon, with its more than five hundred pounds of occupants, silently began to roll, inch by inch, meter by weird meter, backward – and up, up, up. We all stared goggle-eyed as the car slowly flubbered its way at least fifty feet in reverse from the queer tree.

“Your foot’s on the gas!” Jamie shrieked.

“It is not, the damn thing’s in neutral!’

In a few seconds, the car halted. But whatever had happened was beyond strange. Not believing my own eyes, and being well educated in the epistemological pathways of human knowledge, I proceeded forward in order to turn and test things from the opposite direction. Back to neutral, we returned after coming to a dead stop beside the trinket tree, and lo! the car, without benefit of combustion engine power, accelerated this time uphill at perhaps twice the speed as before. In fact, the thing refused to stop at the crest and kept gaining demented power until I jammed on the breaks. “Give me Spielberg!” I cried, and of course the children scoffed.

Were the sheep dotted high on the ridges laughing? Did their own feet adhere to the ground? Was Ireland dangerous to one’s every bearing?

“You would have to find this spot, wouldn’t you?” said Jamie, knowing that I had once written about a gravity-obsessed Roger Babson, whose college named after him in Boston boasts Isaac Newton’s rebuilt library, a transplant from the original apple tree, and the core works of the Anti-Gravity Research Foundation, along with a twenty-foot-high globe marking dozens of spots around the world where bizarre gravity-defying phenomena have been voluminously recorded. But the Comeraghs’ Magic Road was not indicated on that globe, so in the pursuit of science, we crisscrossed this enigmatic stretch over and over again to test which way the car’s wheels would roll – uphill or down? – on their own. And soon we were joined by another car, and then a second, doing the exact same thing. Here we were at the top of the world in a conga line of gravity-defying Irish. Beautiful.

In search of more commonplace reality, we hiked to the glorious cascade of Mahon Falls, making a game all the while of competing with the kids to see who could count the most sheep hundreds of feet above us on the crests of the surrounding ridges. Everyone knows there are no reptiles or amphibians in Ireland, but the boys of course found fresh frog’s eggs in a nearby ditch and squeezed their slimy spawn into an empty Coke bottle for later enrichment in their bedroom. Strange, strange is the Emerald Isle.

The journey home inspired us further. In the lovely coastal village of Ardmore we came upon a soaring eight-hundred-year-old round tower that protected the monks there from Vikings and local heathens. Beside it, nestled in the hill, lay the tiny, thirteen-hundred-year-old oratory of St. Declan, who some scholars believe brought Christianity to Ireland before St. Patrick. The whole hillside breathed with the sanctitude of holy ground, with the remains of a monastery surrounded by the graves of peasants and postmen, barons, sailors, and deans, and the dead from more wars than today’s students can remember. At the sea’s edge stood a quiet sculpture of the revered St. Declan embossed with the icons of his
legacy – a bell, a sail, and a steeple-high round tower – inscribed with these words:

This afternoon, there was no reason to doubt a word – about bells floating on stones, cars rolling uphill, fairy circles, the whole web of Irish wonder. In fact, we ached to share our experiences with the treasured friends of my parents and now ourselves, Dr. Michael Buckley and his wife, Hylda, who happened to be visiting Cork at the moment. One of their closest friends had organized a party to celebrate our arrival in the promised land that very night. How could you beat it? We’d been in Ireland for seven weeks, and still our arrival was being toasted. So we dropped off the kids and found our way to the elegant 225-year-old home of a kind of shadow mayor of our adopted city.

“Defying gravity, Neptune thrusting your glasses from the sea, and finding Brian O’Donnell and the Hi-B? Do you have any idea of the luck you are riding over here?” laughed Mick. “I mean, I can only rejoice in the things that have happened since moving to America. Hylda, the kids, the house, the practice, and all the rest. But I can never stop feeling that the most carefree years of my life were the ones I spent in Cork. I miss this place always. They laugh louder and longer here than any other place on earth, and they do it every day. I envy you.”

We were sipping wine in the very formal sitting room of his dear friend Michael Bradley, proprietor of a prosperous grocery shop and “off-licence” or liquor store on Cork’s North Main Street. Forty or more guests were assembled around us, our host
being a friend of about every third person in Cork and a master at organizing parties at a whim. His gracious consort, the recently widowed Hilary O’Sullivan, served smoked salmon on slivers of brown bread from a silver tray, proffered with a warm solicitation after each taker.

Mick Buckley, nearly seventy, left Ireland in 1958, along with 40,000 other members of his impoverished generation. He and his Cork-born wife, Hylda, had as always their youngest daughter, Mary, who was born with Down’s Syndrome, lovingly at their sides. Mick, who has about the gentlest eyes ever issued, looked over the merry crowd and nodded, “You’d better treasure this.”

How could we not? Our host, Michael Bradley, impeccably attired in a pinstriped suit and blue and gold tie, was introducing us with a diplomat’s fanfare to similarly stylish barristers, restaurateurs, colonels – dozens of distinguished members of Cork’s upper classes, a number of whom belong to the select local families still called the Merchant Princes. None of this crowd would ever be caught dead in the Hi-B, and yet they had a spirit that was every bit as mirthful and quirky as was found in that place.

Palates were constantly refreshed, and the conversation pranced in its inimitable Cork way. Suddenly our host tapped his glass with a spoon.

“Let’s have a toast to the new Corkonians,” he announced, his lips puckering with the trickster look that half of Ireland wears so well. “I know you will all join me in wishing Jamie and David a splendid time in Cork, even if Americans do sometimes arrive in peculiar ways. Why, I believe there is a song about this.”

With that, the urbane Michael Bradley promptly burst into “Yankee Doodle came to town, riding on a pony!” Nearly every remaining guest joined in with, “Stuck his finger in his hat and called it macaroni!” and suddenly placed their generally far from young hands on each other’s shoulders to form a train of pretend ponies as they cantered singing from room to room. Ireland of the welcomes, begod.

A few days later we met up again with the Buckleys in Kinsale, an exceedingly pretty, if promoted-to-death, harbor town famous
for fine restaurants, quaintly winding lanes, and lavish parties in seaview houses that cost over a million pounds. The property-selling agents like to call the place Ireland’s Riviera, and the briefest excursion on a sailboat, which ply the surrounding sheltered inlets in great number, yields views of shimmering, cliff-ringed bays that live up to the bill.

Our first stop was the nearby star-shaped Charles Fort, upon whose ramparts a hundred feet above the harbor the boys scurried about with their toy guns, to the great distaste of their rapidly maturing sister. One look at the surrounding greenswards rolling forever onward to blue ocean, the whole panoply shimmering under a dance of exquisitely delicate light, and I felt yet another jolt of love for Ireland. The happy yelping of our children boosted the heart higher.

“Isn’t it wonderful,” said Hylda, “the way the kids can run free here with no whistle-blowing park rangers roping people into official tours? Thank goodness the Irish still just leave you alone to do whatever you want at your own pace.” She herself had an arm lovingly encircling their daughter Mary, and that, too, was touching. One of Ireland’s untold secrets is the communal love that is poured out to the disabled. Perhaps this stems from the fact the country has never legalized abortion as a means, used so widely elsewhere, to eliminate looming birth defects, or perhaps it’s because the Irish still retain some heightened sense of compassion for the unfortunates once confronted everywhere in their impoverished land. Or maybe it even owes to the country’s extra wattage of surviving Christian faith. But a newcomer is struck by how much more visible and also cheerfully woven into daily life are the infirm in Ireland, where the warehousing of those with a handicap is still regarded as a moral failing. At this moment, gazing meditatively on the far ocean, I certainly wasn’t dwelling on such weighty matters. But all these truths hung like a whisper around us.

I looked around at the atmospheric site, and Mick Buckley, his voice soft as an Irish April, began to unravel its history: Charles Fort, along with another redoubt across the channel named after King James, was built in the 1600s to protect the great fleets of
barks and frigates that once used Kinsale as their last port of call before heading off for refills of West Indian rum, Chinese silk, and other supplies vital to the day-to-day life of the British Empire. These fortresses were also intended to dissuade the Spanish from repeating a certain local visit in 1601. That was the year when the powers-that-be in Madrid dispatched an invasion fleet to join with a native uprising intended to crush the might of Elizabeth I, and return the Irish to rule over their island. The Spanish expeditionary forces succeeded in seizing Kinsale’s castles, but landed far south of where they had been expected, and were soon besieged by an English counterassault that forced them to hunker down where they were.