ONE
2001
I did not become ashamed of being Irish until I was well into the middle years of my life.
I might start with the evening I showed up at my sister’s home for dinner and she had no recollection of issuing the invitation; I believe that was the night when she first showed signs of losing her mind.
Earlier that day, George W. Bush had been inaugurated as president of the United States for the first time, and when I arrived at Hannah’s house on the Grange Road in Rathfarnham, she was glued to the television, watching highlights of the ceremony, which had taken place in Washington around lunchtime.
It was almost a year since I had last been there, and it shamed me to think that after an initial flurry of visits in the wake of Kristian’s death, I had settled into my old ways of making only an occasional phone call or organizing an even more occasional lunch in Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street, a place that reminded us both of our childhood, for it was here that Mam would take us for a treat when we came into town to see the Christmas window at Switzers all those years ago. And it was here that we ate lunches of sausages, beans, and chips when we were brought in to Clerys to be fitted for our First Communion clothes, exhilarating afternoons when she would let us order the biggest cream cake we could find and a Fanta orange to wash it down. We would take the 48A bus from outside Dundrum church into the city center, and Hannah and I would run upstairs to the front seats, holding on to the bar in front of us as the driver made his way through Milltown and Ranelagh, over the hump of the Charlemont Bridge, in the direction of the old Metropole Cinema behind Tara Street station, where once we had been brought to see Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard and been dragged out again when the bare-breasted women of Otaheite made their way in kayaks toward the lusty sailors, garlands of flowers around their necks the only protection for their modesty. Mam had written a letter to the Evening Press later that night, demanding that the film be banned. Is this a Catholic country, she asked, or is it not?
Bewley’s has not changed very much in the thirty-five years since then, and I have always felt a great affection for it. I am a man for nostalgia; it is a curse on me sometimes. The comfort of my childhood returns to me when I see the high-backed booths that still cater to all types of Dubliners. The retired gentlemen, white haired and clean shaven, Old Spiced, shrouded in their unnecessary suits and ties as they read the business section of The Irish Times even though it no longer has any relevance to their lives. The married women enjoying the indulgence of a midmorning cup of coffee with no one but wonderful Maeve for company. The students from Trinity College, lounging around over big mugs of coffee and sausage rolls, noisy and tactile, blooming with the excitement of being young and in each others’ company. A few unfortunates down on their luck, willing to trade the price of a cup of tea for an hour or two of warmth. The city has always drawn the benefit of Bewley’s indiscriminate hospitality, and occasionally Hannah and I would partake of it, a middle-aged man and his widowed sister, neatly attired, careful of conversation, still with a taste for a cream cake, but no stomach for the Fanta anymore.
Hannah had phoned to invite me over a few days earlier and I had immediately said yes. Was she lonely? I wondered. Her eldest son, my nephew Aidan, was away on the sites in London and almost never came home. His phone calls, I knew, were even less regular than my own. But then he was a difficult man. One day, without warning, he had turned from being a cheerful and extroverted boy, something of a precocious entertainer, to a distant and angry presence in Hannah and Kristian’s house, and that fury, which seemed to arrive without warning to poison the blood of his veins, never diminished through his teenage years, only building and swelling and destroying everything it came into contact with. Tall and well built, his Nordic ancestry providing him with clear skin and blond hair, he could charm the ladies with barely a flicker of an eyebrow, and he had a taste for them that seemed impossible to satisfy. It is true that he got one poor girl into trouble when the pair of them were not even old enough to drive, and there was war over it for a time; in the end the child was given up for adoption after a terrible row between Kristian and the girl’s father that led to the police being called out. I never heard from Aidan now. He had a tendency to look at me with contempt in his eyes, and once, when he had drink on him, he stood beside me at a family gathering, placing one hand against the wall while he leaned too close, the stink of cigarettes and alcohol forcing me to turn my head away, and bulged a tongue into his cheek as he said in a perfectly friendly tone, “Listen to me, you. Do you never think you wasted your life, no? Do you never wish you could go back and live it all over again? Do everything differently? Be a normal man instead of what you are?” And I shook my head and told him that at the center of my life was a feeling of great contentment, that although I had made my choices at a young age, I stood by them still. I stood by them, I insisted, and although he might not have been able to see the sense of my decisions, they had given my days clarity and meaning, qualities that his own life sadly appeared to lack. “You’re not wrong there, Odran,” he said, stepping away, freeing me from the prison of his torso and arms. “But still, I couldn’t be what you are. I’d rather shoot myself.”
No, Aidan could never have made the choices I made, and I feel grateful for that now. The truth is that he did not share my innocence or my inability to confront. Even as a boy, he was more of a man than I would ever be. The talk now was that he was living in London with a girl a few years older than himself, a girl with two children of her own, which struck me as a curious thing, as he’d wanted no part of the child that might have been his.
The only other person in Hannah’s house now was the young lad, Jonas, who had always been introverted and seemed incapable of holding a proper conversation without staring at his shoes or drumming his fingers in the air like some restless pianist. He blushed when you looked at him and preferred to be away in his room reading books, but whenever I asked him who his favorite authors were, he appeared reluctant to tell me or would name someone I had never heard of, a foreign name generally, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, in an almost deliberate act of defiance. At his father’s wake the previous March, I had tried to lighten the mood by asking is it reading that you’re doing behind that closed door, Jonas, or something else? I didn’t mean anything by it, of course—it was intended as a joke—but the moment the words were out of my mouth, I heard how vulgar they sounded, and the poor lad—I think there were three or four other people present to witness the scene, including his mother—went scarlet and choked on his 7-Up. I wanted to tell him how sorry I was for embarrassing him, I wanted to badly, but that would only have made matters worse, and so I left it, and I left him, and I sometimes felt that we might never recover from that moment, for surely he thought I had set out to humiliate him, a thing I would never have done nor dreamed of doing.
At this time, the time of which I speak, Jonas was sixteen years old and studying for his Intermediate Certificate, an exam that was not expected to present him with any great difficulties. He had been bright from the start, learning to speak and to read well before other children of his age. Kristian, when Kristian was alive, liked to say that with brains like his he could become a surgeon or a barrister, prime minister of Norway, or president of Ireland, but whenever I heard those words uttered, I would think, No, that’s not this boy’s destiny. I didn’t know what his destiny might be, but no, that wasn’t it.