The Music Lesson (4 page)

“Her death was only a relief, not a sadness, but the end of a sadness,” he told me once, on a long car trip to Maine, where we would stay a week with my favorite
friend of his, a retired detective named Jimmy Leary, a bachelor who had inherited his family’s farm in Hallowell.

I was fourteen that summer. I hated my unreliable body and I hated the popular girls who possessed the secrets of the universe, or at least the secrets of eighth-grade success. I wished I were a boy so I could be the son I thought my father must have wanted, instead of my faulty female self, who perhaps reminded him of his mother, and, inevitably and more to the point, of my own missed and missing mother.

The way he said that about Rose’s death, with a grim matter-of-factness, I believed him—I believed that he believed that the sum of his feelings on the subject was contained within the boundaries of those words.

“I never felt loved by her, only blamed,” he said after that, shaking his head as if to clear it of further bad thoughts before turning to me with one of his let’s-change-the-subject-shall-we head tilts and asking me if I would be ready for an ice cream stop in Damariscotta.

We would never have had such a conversation, brief as it was, if Paddy had been along with us that day. “Spare your granddad further grief on that subject,” Pete always admonished at the conclusion of any conversation about his mother, though I needed no reminding. I
always knew that the subject of Rose was off-limits around Paddy.

When he wasn’t drinking, my grandfather was a big-hearted man whose love and kindness were nearly enough for my father as he was growing up. Paddy cooked and cleaned and kept Pete well, though surely the two of them were lonely much of the time, in that house without a wife or mother.

Paddy had been sent into exile by his own parents, he had witnessed the carnage at Belleau Wood, and he had failed to provide a mother for his son. While Paddy didn’t seem to dwell on the grief in his life, those nightly tipples of Jameson, neat, must have been necessary to take the edges off the darkness.

I loved Paddy. I was named for him. When I think of him in my childhood, I picture him in his uniform, never civvies, though he retired when I was little and he must have stopped wearing blues. He lived with Pete and me at the end of his life. He was huge, had a loud voice, and an “abouwt the houwse” accent. He died of a heart attack when I was in junior high school. He had an enormous policeman’s funeral. Bagpipes.

Pete has probably waged a lifelong battle with depression, to put it into clinical terms. The Dolan doldrums. How I admire my father for his strength, his decency, his struggles, his rages. Until now, my passions, if they could even be called that, have always been more cerebral, even
when life seemed good. Maybe feeling too much of anything, even in the good times, would have been dangerously close to missing my mother. In the more recent bad times, I have gone through long stretches when I don’t think I can get out of bed and get dressed and pass for a person even one more day. Death does that.

In the last three years, I have accepted living in a permanent state of anesthesia, a highly functional but sealed-over kind of detachment. My hundreds of hours chipping away in the therapy mine have alerted me to some of what that’s about, as well as to the power of my identification with Pete. No wonder I wanted to be a boy. But while I think I’ve gotten over most of my difficulties—or at least come to terms with them, worked through them, as they say in the terrible and distant language of the mental-health profession—my beliefs, my commitments, those things connect with Pete in a vital way.

And they connect with Mickey. I am, after all, here in Ireland, now, living out the Dolan destiny.

Sometimes I study her for so long that I need to get away from that room, and I go for a walk along the cow path that passes by the cottage and goes around the hem of the cove and up the opposite side. At the edge of a field where the cow path doubles back, I like to climb through a barbed-wire fence that’s there to keep cows in, not the likes of me out, and then I walk across a series of
crooked ancient fields toward the sea, all the way to the rock at the top of the cliff. That rock, or maybe the whole top of the cliff—I’m not sure which—is called Ardnageeha, which means “the height of the wind.”

The Dutch painters of the seventeenth century were not afraid of the wind. Think of those skies filling the canvas; think of those towering dark clouds, those wind-lashed trees. At Ardnageeha, I imagine Jacob van Ruisdael beside me, working with his characteristic probity, painting the wind’s portrait.

T
HERE ARE
principally two kinds of conversations that have brought out the rages in Pete: when, as a provocative teenager, I unwisely pushed him a few times into further explanations for the cruelty of his father’s parents, and the occasional shouting match he still gets into when some hapless person (not me, never me) voices the wrong sort of opinion about the British in Ireland. Or the British in China, or the British in India, or the British in North America, or the British in Africa. All through the Nixon administration, my father could go on for hours blaming the British entirely for the war in Vietnam.

When Pete gets the wind in his sails on the subject of the famine, there is no stopping him before he has
denounced and damned the Brits to hell and back for their calculated genocidal policies. When I was growing up, I seriously believed that everyone knew that the two most evil men in history were Adolf Hitler and Lloyd George. When I said this aloud, my ninth-grade history teacher laughed at me. That was when I discovered that the world isn’t always going to agree with the Dolans and that it is necessary and prudent, at times, to keep one’s views hidden.

Do we need to do this now? There’s a change in the air, maybe, with cease-fires that keep getting broken and put back together. Maybe not. I have so much to learn. Mickey has been very patient. There’s a change all right, with copper-fastened coalitions and new brooms sweeping clean and people sitting down at the same table in the same room and all that. But there will be no selling out this time. Peace at any price is no peace at all. And we can’t just sit back and wait for the once and future Little England to get it together. They have had their marching season and now we will have ours.

We won’t wait. We are not waiting. They’ve been standing on our necks for too many years. The past is always present, as Mickey says. We must never lose sight of that.

My biggest regret, my only regret, is that I can’t tell Pete what I’m doing, what this is about. I think he would be proud. I hate to lie to him, and I wish I didn’t have to,
but Mickey has given me no choice in the matter. Oh, Pete. I know he’d be proud.

Perhaps every generation of every family has its own myth of the lost fortune. My grandmother Rose’s disappointment, so the story goes, was about being cheated out of certain prosperity. At least that’s where her sorrows supposedly began. Though who can say what the first part of her life was like? We hardly begin to know all of her baggage when she sailed for the New World. She was an orphan, a brave and plucky battlefield hospital nurse, according to Paddy, according to Pete, so she must have had a fair amount of courage and gumption. She should have been able to deal with the comparatively tame adversity of those pigheaded Dolans who balked at welcoming an English girl into the family, hinting darkly all the while about who knew for sure if the bun in the oven was one of our own or some Tommy’s leaving.

Whatever its source, her bitterness was profound. You could say she squandered her own good fortune. My father has spent his life mourning that loss, that missing love. Sometimes I wonder if he would have such violent opinions about the Brits if they hadn’t been the source of his own troubles as well as Ireland’s.

Until his mandatory retirement some twelve years ago, Pete was, inevitably perhaps, a detective with the Boston PD. He lives in an apartment on O Street in
South Boston now. For a few years, he worked part-time as a guard at a bank, though, with his pension, he really didn’t need the work. He was a formidable presence, even in the bogus uniform of the security service. Pete spends most evenings at Foley’s, an Irish bar in Southie where they speak his language.

I think one of the reasons Pete took that security job was the uniform, which kept him connected to his youth, his days in the navy during the war and later as a rookie on his first beats. The Dolan men look good in uniforms. He started out in Dorchester, then transferred downtown before he made detective grade and began to dress in the plainclothes uniform that he wore throughout my childhood—khaki pants, a white button-down shirt, and a threadbare tweed jacket, with a rarely worn necktie looping out of one of the jacket pockets the way a doctor’s stethoscope hangs out of the pocket of his lab coat.

I suppose this inventory of Pete’s wardrobe makes him sound professorial-looking, but when I was a child, two things kept him from resembling my friends’ fathers, who were mostly academics and lawyers: his shoes, spit-polished black wing tips, and the way his jackets always fit badly over his gun.

My mother died when I was five years old. She was thirty-one when she died of breast cancer. When I think of her, I don’t know that I really remember her so much
as I remember missing her. My clearest memory is of her hands.

She must have been sick, near the end, in bed, perhaps sleeping while I sat with her. I don’t remember her speaking; I can’t remember the sound of her voice. Perhaps it was the last time I saw her. I don’t know if it was five minutes or an hour that I spent with her that day. Or maybe my memory is faulty and I am conflating several different occasions into this one, crystalline image. I have a soundless recollection of bright sunlight and shadows slanting across a window ledge, and the smell of freshly laundered sheets over another smell—the odor of stale water in a vase of dying flowers, or death itself.

But my strongest memories are almost always visual. When I think of her, I think of that day, and when I think of that day, I recall the contrast of her yellowish skin against the white of the bed linen, her hands like bird wings, skimming the covers, a gesture I would recall with a shock of recognition twenty years later in front of a van der Weyden in Munich, at the Alte Pinakothek.

My own hands, I discovered that afternoon—surely the light I remember is afternoon light?—were miniature replicas of hers, yet the skin on mine was new and perfect-fitting, and the skin on hers was loose and fragile. Very gently, I pinched and squeezed little tents of the pliable
folds that covered the bones on the back of her hands while she slept. I matched one of my hands to hers, laid it on top of hers, pushed my five fingertips into the corresponding whorls on her knuckles.

Then she wasn’t there anymore and what I remember of her after that is only her absence.

She was Louise Kelly from New York. (Her Kellys are probably the Kellys who emigrated from Mallow, also in County Cork, just at the end of the famine in 1851.) I don’t know very much about her family. Her mother was a Gross from Bridgeport, Connecticut, possibly Jewish. I never knew my maternal grandparents; they retired to Arizona when I was a baby and then they died, unexpectedly, one after the other, before I was eight, leaving me some very useful money in a trust. Grandpa Kelly had been a fireman in Queens. I have no authentic memories of them that are not based on a couple of bleached scallop-edged snapshots of two white-haired people holding a tiny newborn me on their laps.

My parents met at a Saint Patrick’s Day party in Boston, to which my mother had been brought by a guy with whom my father had served in the army. The story goes: Who’s the pretty girl? my father asks his buddy. I don’t want you to meet her, his buddy replies. Why not? asks my father. Because, his buddy says, if I introduce you to her then you’ll marry her.

My mother taught the fifth grade in the public elementary school I later attended. Though it might have been the obvious thing to do, I wasn’t sent to parochial school. In our house, God was certainly respected, but not feared. Pete called himself a collapsed Catholic, and especially with few grandparental pressures—Paddy never brought it up—we rarely went to church. Christianity interests me as the subject of so many of the world’s great paintings, of course. Beyond that, it occurs to me right now that I have always thought of myself not as a Catholic but as an Irish Catholic. I do try to get to Mass on Christmas Eve and at Easter, though I’m not quite sure why. I think it’s because I like the smells, the odor of incense and true faith that comes wafting off the older people. I like the ritual, the rhythms of it, as much as the meaning of it. The largeness and smallness of each moment.