by Sara Dillon
In later years, Una always disapproved of everything I did. No, that was not right; she had disapproved of everything I wanted to do, and thus only some of what I actually did. I had bad taste in men, she said, and she was correct. She accused me of being too vague; too exaggerated; too impractical; too repetitious. She had to pick up the slack for everyone, she said. Una was taller than me, by quite a lot, and had reddish hair. This red hair marked her as Daddy’s special favorite, against the odds. There were many family tales of how Daddy, otherwise in no sense a ladies’ man, was partial to red-haired women.
Una talked me into going to law school, although she denied this. Before law school, when I wanted to ditch Japan—and it was true that I couldn’t take any more of Japan—to go back to poetry, Una made up a mock poem that went like this:
You there in the light there
Grandfather there in the greenish light there
Is that what you want to spend the rest of your life doing? She asked. Why don’t you get out and help real people, do something real?
Under this new scheme, I was to use my skills, whatever these might be; though I suspected full well and in advance that I would find I had none.
So I said goodbye to the white light, not see you later, but a real goodbye, to the absurdity that I admit I was; the excess, the exaggeration. I said, Goodbye, I will never be back again.
When next you see me, I will be someone else.
And I emerged after some years all alone, law school over and done, still just what I had been all along. I know she was very disappointed in me for that, for being unable to change.
She arrived mid-afternoon on a Saturday; the black Jetta pulled up tentatively. Greensboro is small, and I like giving very precise directions.
“Your Auntie Una,” I said to the kids, and they began to hop up and down in front of the window.
I could see Una get out of the driver’s seat; she was wearing a dark plaid jacket, like something we would have worn in high school.
“Auntie Woona, Auntie Woona,” Emmet shrieked, as if his joy knew no bounds. The two kids clasped hands and went running down the front path; Emmet was still clumsy from his lack of exercise in the orphanage, all those days spent with ten or fifteen other children in a room, just looking at each other.
Una held out her arms to the kids. If you looked closely, it seemed a gesture of pity, but they didn’t see that.
Well, she said as she reached the door, as if she’d agreed with herself not to fly off the handle.
How is Sven?
Okay I guess; I don’t know, we don’t talk. He never says.
It was the same old joke.
The extent to which that man can stay in his quiet place is amazing, she said.
She was already interested in the layout of the house, I could tell.
As I said, she really loved buildings; houses, especially farm houses, and meadows. Her eyes went automatically to the arrangement of the rooms in our rental house; the staircase, the possibility for expansion, the condition of the walls.
It smells like apples in here; the way Aunt Olive’s garage used to.
It’s wonderful, isn’t it? Maybe Una could be persuaded.
It was a hell of a long drive, she said, complaining. Especially after we were just up here a few weeks ago.
Here it comes, I thought.
Your hair, she said.
I know, it’s bad.
Kids seem okay, she observed, as if surprised. Una didn’t like to dwell on the possible sadness of children. She believed that they would be happy if only they were let out enough to run around. Her son Hugh still had tantrums at eight, and whenever he was outside racing up and down, she would sigh and say, This is just what he needs. Let him run, I always say that. Just let them get out of here and run.
Whenever the talk turned to the past, she would say, But weren’t kids always allowed out more back then to run? They weren’t cooped up all the time like they are now.
The unpleasant side of this was the continual implication that if I exposed mine to a slightly higher level of physical danger, they would be happier. All indications of them having “issues” apparently stemmed from the fact that I was a nervous Nellie. On this, she and Sven presented a united front.
How’s Hugh? asked Madina. They were nearly the same age and had been inseparable since Madina was adopted from Central Asia at the age of two. Madina hated missing out on anything, and the deep, beautiful folds of her eyelids clouded over as she asked Una.
Hughie’s great; he misses you, Una said. She sat down in a Morris chair, patting the arms of it.
A Morris chair, she said. Our eyes met for a moment.
I don’t have a lot of time, she said, So let’s sort this out. Somebody has to.
I tried to tell her that we were all right. The kids loved it here, I could spend more time with them. I was looking for a job, something in Hardwick maybe. Emmet could go to family daycare; Madina would be starting school.
If you want to make insane decisions for yourself, that’s one thing, Una said finally. But what do I tell Gramma? What do I do about her?
We’d begun to refer to our mother as Gramma, I guess after Hughie was born.
I’ll take care of it. I’ll call her.
Una clearly found this beneath contempt, not worth responding to. She stood and looked out the window.
Your job is history, you know that.
I thought of the ponderous hallways of the law school, the catered lunches, the steam off the pilaf.
Lally show sing, Emmet said brightly, taking Una’s hand.
He wants to show you the swing on the tree, Madina explained. She was his translator, as I had been Una’s when she was very small. No one had known what she was trying to say but me. Of course, I had no practice talking, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, Una always said.
I watched the three of them through the window. Una was pretending to run her fastest up and down the grass, as if she couldn’t keep up with them. Emmet was hysterically joyful. I rapped on the old glass and waved.
I wanted to think about something immediate, like food, about cutting vegetables, about lentils. I wanted to do my Saturday errands.
This weather was familiar to Una and me. We had moved to Vermont when I was twelve and Una only nine. Daddy’s blood pressure was so high they told him he was “next door to shock,” and they sent him up to run a plant in Vermont. He made less money and worried about being broke and sick. We left the big stucco house in Albany and lived on a mean little street and went with tough kids down to Lake Champlain to light beach fires. After we moved, it seemed Gramma and Daddy had no idea what we were doing. Gramma went to work in a big department store. Every Sunday we drove to Aunt Olive’s in Hyde Park. The weather had been just like this. From September, there was no warmth left at all.
The leaves in the front garden and on down to Caspian Lake had begun to go yellow. Una came back inside, flushed and rubbing her hands together. I had the feeling she would not try and get it all sorted out. She had decided not to attempt that. She would punish me by leaving me to my own devices.
In fact, she didn’t seem to want to talk to me any further.
I’ll take the kids and pick up a few things. Is that farm stand still open?
Madina loved anything new. She waved goodbye and climbed into the back seat of the Jetta.
It was a funny thing. No one ever seemed to ask me if they could borrow my kids, move them, take them here or there. I always asked others, though, on the rare occasions I would make such a plan. There was something about me that made others consider me not someone you needed to ask. Just go ahead. She won’t mind. It was my father’s thing; that mark of diffidence that sent a silent message to others. But in Daddy’s case, he enjoyed what this brought him, that is, being left alone to go driving for coffee and donuts with Gramma.
It still took a couple of hours to get Emmet to settle down and go to sleep. As he drifted, after crying himself into fa
tigue, I kissed his shallow little eyelids, his fingers. Madina was waiting, as she always had to now, for me to have time to say goodnight to her.
Are we staying here? Or will we go back? she whispered. It probably seemed to her that Una could order us to return.
I don’t know, I said. We can talk about it tomorrow.
Oh; ohhhh, she whined at me. You always say that.
Don’t wake him up, I said.
If it hadn’t been too cold to sit out, it would have been just like the summer holidays: kids asleep at last, Una and I opening a bottle of wine and sitting together, wrapped in shawls, watching the car lights pass far away along the hills, trying to guess what other lights might be.
I can bring them home with me, she had said abruptly.
No! I said, uncharacteristically sharp. They’re mine. I need them.
Just a thought, she said, raising her hands defensively. It could give you time to chill out a little.
It was a funny thing about Una, there was nothing you could say that she didn’t get. She knew what this was all about, and yet held any statements about it at bay, substituted a false understanding of it for the real one. She knew poetry as well, she knew a great poem from a good one; she knew about the heart becoming a stone. She knew about me and Ireland, she knew about everything.
Chill out! I said, just on the edge of raising my voice.
Forget I said it then.
I couldn’t afford to have her leave angry. I couldn’t manage that.
I heard a funny sound and opened the door. It was foxes, laughing, just as I had heard them so often at Park Baun.
This reminded me again of coming back from the pub late on those merciless Irish nights, so terribly alone in my car, parking the Opel on the wet grass, leaving the headlights on until I got the front door open, running through the fog, certain that I would be killed imminently, slamming the door behind me. It was a new wooden door; the old one had gone rotten. Depending on the season, all sorts of creatures managed to squeeze through under the old one and get into the house. There were frogs and mice and bugs of all kinds. I could sit in the chair in the middle of the room and watch them sneaking in, tentatively at first, blinking their eyes in the light after they’d made it through.
Una had phoned me at Park Baun sometimes, the telephone sound echoing through the rooms with their stone walls. Una thought that everything I’d ever done was more or less stupid; that said, she claimed to admire me. Of course, she resented me for dominating our house with my incessant talk when we were little. In fact, though, she thought that everything in my past since then was also just stupid, even the things that were her ideas to begin with.
Maybe stupid isn’t the right word. Rather, absurd. I was absurd when I had a sort of love affair with my high school history teacher, absurd when I left high school early and went to Ireland, getting so involved in the life of the countryside that it changed my accent; absurd when I went to St. Theo’s, Daddy’s college, and did drama, absurd in all the plays, absurd with my poetry, absurd with my piano playing in my college room (my abilities entirely overblown). Absurd to have got involved with an abusive and angry Indian exchange student, absurd to study Japanese, absurd to marry a Japanese man, absurd to leave him almost immediately (that was not quite as absurd); then absurd to believe myself to be in love with a Japanese singer.
Then, lost and disaffected, I was absurd to teach Japanese literature in a university. And with that, she encouraged me to go to law school. I would love to say she forced me, though it wasn’t quite that. I was absurd to hate law school so much, with every ounce of my being; it cancelled me out, and very nearly killed me. There were lots of things that happened during that time I just couldn’t remember. People later claimed to have seen me in New York, but I couldn’t recall. All I could clearly remember was running and running at dawn on Riverside Drive; or writing late into the night and putting mountains of poems in a drawer, never to touch them.
After law school, I was absurd to meet Seanie Mannion in Roscommon, absurd to take up with him, absurd to move to Ireland again; absurd, absurd, absurd. She had a point, really.
Years back, Una’s therapist told her I was psychotically delusional to think that that Japanese singer loved me, though everything I told Una had been true; strange and intense, granted, and in a sense he did love me, absurd though it surely was to want him that much. Of all the ill-considered things to want.
I don’t think Una agreed with the therapist’s suggestion, though she relayed this diagnosis to me to let me know how utterly absurd my love for that singer was.
The last I remember of the therapist was Una’s story of how she chased Una around a bookstore demanding payment of an overdue therapy bill.
Una stayed the night after all, and woke up cheerily enough. She had decided, I saw, not to have it out with me. She bounced Emmet on her knee and said how much she would like to stay in Greensboro. We lined up to wave goodbye. Madina was wearing one of my old sweaters and looking forlorn. Una started backing out of the driveway, then paused and rolled down the window.
What am I going to say to Gramma? she asked, then rolled it back up without waiting for an answer.
I felt lost after her car disappeared up the hill, off into the yellowing trees, up the road to Hardwick, then back, back down to Boston, with all its angry drivers and highway exits.
It had been much easier before she came. I didn’t feel able to keep on going after she’d left. I wanted to phone someone, to ask what to do. I felt cold; I suspected the heating system was defective, but didn’t know what to do about it.
I felt all at once like I’d come back to die. My head was a jumble of places, Aix-en-Provence and Karaganda and Ogikubo and Roscommon. I felt like a disused encyclopedia, stuck on the shelf or at a yard sale. My mind turned quickly away from anything to do with law, the law, regulations, statutes, precedents, treaties, judicial opinions. At least there was no law here. The fields were fields again. The grass was brown, the leaves going red, the water dark blue green.
Get moving and write a book, a filmscript, Una had said to me many times. Stop talking about it and do it. Do what you want. I’m sorry I ever gave you any advice.
I thought with a shudder of the angry student who had come into my office after class, his eyes as he repeated, If you don’t want me asking questions, just tell me, say it straight out. I don’t want to be the last to know, I don’t want to be laughed at.
How confused they were by the cuisinart of dicta, an arbitral clause here, a self-executing international agreement there, a future of debt and self-doubt. And then this petite woman pushing them around. Whereas in fact I was ridiculously polite to them, laughing at their jokes, nodding, Interesting, interesting, responsive to their slightest monosyllable.
I didn’t think you’d be like that, he was saying. But just tell me, because I’m really getting the feeling you don’t want my questions.
Goodbye, I thought. Gone fishing. Gone to a dentist appointment that will last forever.
I always avoided saying goodbye by telling people, I never say goodbye, it’s too hard.
But in fact, I loved saying goodbye, shaking out the clothes, throwing them in the laundry. Goodbye, never see you again. White wine and pickles and the start of a new life, and no need to ever see you again.
Houses
I thought of selling the house at Park Baun, in East Galway, if it could be called a house. In the early 1990s, it seemed the empty houses needed me, and I picked one out. All that work I did on it, depleting my bank account every month, year after year. Did I phone Jimmy Meehan or Frank Dolan about the windows or the doors or fireplace or chimney; was the chimney cleaned, the birds have nested in it, I got smoked out of it last time, ring up Danny, he’ll set you right. The walls were so cold, and thousands of bottles had been thrown into the back garden by the bachelor brothers over the years, all embedded in the dirt. I had ripped down the old back kitchen, barely a shell, and had a new one put up. I p
ut in a bathroom and a fridge and a cooker and tiled the floors and still it felt like a barn. All the improvements had hardly made any difference. Left by itself for a few hours, it would return from whence it had come, go to ground, cold as a badger’s lair.
Perhaps what they said about poured concrete was true; nothing to be done with it. Red rotten, knock the bastard. That’s what they all told me.
I could sell that house and get some money, and then we would be all right, I thought. It had been standing empty since I came back to America, anyway. And then I reconsidered; I couldn’t sell the house, with its sound of whoosh whoosh in the tall trees, the fox’s hole with the feathers near it, the road with nothing on it. I have just returned to the nineteenth century, I would tell my co-conspirator in the Landscape Preservation Group, standing in the doorway with the blue telephone in my hand, smoking a cigarette. I never smoked in Dublin, but lit up as soon as I arrived at Park Baun. Sometimes it seemed to me I only went there to smoke.
I even kept a stash of ten on the wooden mantelpiece in the side bedroom.
Let me start at the beginning.
Please, let me start in the middle.
That was one reason only Vermont was left. Park Baun was the reason, I mean. They had ruined it, ruined Ireland. It was so utterly destroyed, my most feared thing had come true before my eyes. I had tried everything to stop it, but I couldn’t. I had escaped back to Galway after law school and found that they were ruining it. I tried to save things, but it couldn’t be done. Would you have us live in hovels, Doctor whoever ye are? I was shouted at in forums, so many of them, the speeches, the group meetings, plotting and planning against golf courses, roads and shopping centers.
I couldn’t have imagined that it could just be taken away; it was a place, with rocks and a sky and water never far away. It had its own mad process, the loss of it. Not to personalize history too much, but things do have a way of slipping away from me and being destroyed. That was the fate piece.
