by Sara Dillon
We have to get you better, I said.
She shook her head. Not this time. No good, she said. It was one of her doom phrases, saved for situations in extremis, grief or severe sickness.
You always pull through, I said.
Can’t God just take me? she asked.
I don’t think he wants you, I replied, but I could see she wasn’t ready for humor yet. The hospital staff always liked Gramma; they would stroke her cheek and say, Beautiful lady, as if they could see in her what one could often not see in old people, the lovely young person she had been, favorite of her father, wildly popular with the boys.
We stayed with Una for over a week, going back and forth to Cambridge Hospital. Una and I took turns, she the morning shift and I the afternoon or vice versa. Gramma seemed to be making no progress, but as always, impossible though it seemed, she began to come back to life in tiny increments, maddeningly slow but unmistakable. She would never admit it, or God forbid enjoy it; both directions were bad and undesirable from her point of view, recovery or lack of recovery. Her sodium levels stayed low; her body resisted rehydration. She said she wanted to go forward and finally to stop, but my suspicion was that she wanted to get back home and catch up on the gossip in her assisted living, though she had almost no strength.
I knew she was getting better when she tried to engage me in conversation about why I had to go back to Vermont.
Some evenings, I would leave her feeling fine and resting peaceably. The next morning, there would be a message on my cell phone from Una, telling me that Gramma was depressed, unresponsive, wanting to die.
What happened? I would grump at Una. She was great when I left her last night.
The repetition was as unbearable as it had ever been, the up and down rhythm of the days and nights, as Gramma forced us to will her to live again, but with precious little input from the lady herself.
Gramma didn’t want books or magazines, wouldn’t turn on the television news, wouldn’t pull the cord for the help of nurses. She just lay there and thought, impossibly distant but always holding us in her incomparable grip. Of course, she didn’t want me to go back; one more reason to postpone getting better.
I would try to bring her up to speed on everyone’s plans; that Una and I would take turns visiting, that I needed to get the kids back to school, that I would go back to Vermont, but could return if needed and so forth. As soon as I mentioned these details, Gramma would look away and wave her hand, as if refusing an unappetizing meal.
Why do you keep trying to tell her all that? Una said to me. She doesn’t need to know all that.
When I saw Grandma sleeping, I had the impulse to wake her and thank her for the green birdhouse, the snow on the roof of the manger, the obsessive approach to life she had taught us. Who was to say that wasn’t the better part? When other people were worried about what tennis camp to get their children into, she had the old values of East Galway, knees turned to the fire, witty, resentful, terribly circumscribed.
For Gramma, the worst thing a person could be was “sure of herself.” There were no points made with Gramma for pursuing success. Indeed, every investment in personal glory became part and parcel of a later lament: what a shame you did it at all, if it was going to turn out this way. Gramma sought out the tragic, and in the tragic she could truly enjoy herself.
And once more, she pulled it off. They got her back in her tidy apartment, the shamrock and the African violet, the Quimper teapot. Why didn’t you just let me go? she complained. But God help you if you let an afternoon go by without checking in. My brother Jack phoned and said to us in hushed tones, This time she really wants to go. Wouldn’t it be better just to let her?
But what the dickens did he know about it?
I looked up from grading research papers and saw Sasha standing there.
Thank you for a wonderful seminar, Professor, he said. It looks like we will have you back in the fall.
Yes, I’ll be teaching two courses, I said, without elaboration. I wrote to Calvin, asking what books he would teach in such a case. I didn’t hear back. Summer was coming again.
New York; 1990s
It wasn’t that I ever wanted to be a lawyer—what a thought! Or that I even knew what a lawyer was or did. It was that I wanted to repent.
I would repent for my self-absorption and conceit. I would repent for not being a good enough person. I would repent for the fact that I wanted praise and recognition and told lies to others on my way to Kido. I would repent for wanting Kido to the exclusion of everything else. I would repent for vanity and self-love.
Law school would be a means of redoing everything, a great I’m sorry written in the stars, if I would be allowed to consider stars.
Knowing that Kido would not be coming, I finished up my PhD. Towards the end, I had wandered around Europe, even wandered around Ireland, again. I had half-heartedly indulged myself with short-term admirers, from Taiwan, Jamaica, Korea. I went out on Friday nights and danced, improbably, to calypso music. I had a job teaching Japanese literature, but felt nothing for it. I floundered around in the past, and could not imagine the shape of the future. I had identified an ultimate and then had no vocabulary left with which to proceed.
I joined anti-apartheid networks, international women’s groups working for peace. I got the idea of being a public interest advocate, defender, activist. I abruptly, in an act of madness, quit my university teaching job, and made plans to go to law school. I had never moved into that university office, either. The unpacked boxes just followed me around from place to place.
It was so hot in New York that August. I had to share an apartment with a graduate student in genetics; she studied mice and stayed up all night making calculations. It was so brutally hot outside, but inside the law school it was like an icebox. The massive law school classrooms had no windows. Everyone was frightened. Frightened of the professors, of the assignments, of the huge heavy books with their disjointed tales of people being hit in the head with tennis balls or trying to get redress for arms cut off in train accidents.
As with the story of Sandy, I want to make short work of this one. One thing about going to Greensboro, I would not have to think about those days in New York again. I would not have to spin out that legacy, do something with it, as Una might say. I could simply forget it, pretend it had never happened, wake up as a modern day Rip Van Winkle, rubbing my eyes and wondering where all those years had gone to.
I hated the talk, the look, the smell, the men in suits, the crowded elevators. I hated it with all my might for three long years. I hated my summer jobs, however worthy these might have been, running around courthouse corridors trying to get landlords to stipulate to the extermination of roaches; then a summer of death penalty work in Alabama, reading through trial transcripts of atrocities and mayhem, hotel clerks being shot at point blank range, extended families in trailer parks, and at the end of the hot days wandering the quiet streets of Montgomery in the dark.
It took a great deal of work to hate anything that much. I did not register meeting people, but moved forward like a drone or a robot to memorize details that meant nothing to me. My classmates were like radioactive aliens; I was not only distant from them, but revolted in their presence. I could not hear their voices or see them without mortal dread and terror; I was left for dead.
At night I began to write poems; I wrote cycles and collections and put them in a drawer, unused and unseen. They were long, elaborate, I think even ambitious. I’m not sure where they are now.
I might have gone to do an MFA in writing; I had been offered a teaching fellowship. It was Una who asked me why I wanted to go back to all that, but I know it’s absurd to blame Una. All I had to do was say, Yes, in fact I do. Simple. But I couldn’t. I was stubborn and cowed at the same time. No one had taught me anything about resistance, only submission, aches and pains.
When I finished law school, I asked Una and Jack to come and get me, to bring me away from New York. We packed up a UHaul truck, and I
remember seeing the Upper West Side pass by in a blur; the sound of horns receded until it was quiet, and the city sat far away on the horizon. I was finished with it. I had the impulse to duck down, as if I were running away, fleeing the city, a fugitive.
I did not become a public interest lawyer. The very idea of representing others was completely unfamiliar to me. I didn’t want to be the conduit for other people’s problems. I didn’t want to represent anyone. I only wanted to flee from New York as quickly as I could.
I landed on my feet in a small town in Western Massachusetts.
After dark, I ran along a small lake, beneath the trees, listening to Van Morrison, Poetic Champions Compose.
I tried to unthink the law I had learned, but it continued to weigh on me, as if I was forcibly bound to it. Looking back, I realize I was free to pretend I had never gone, never heard of law school, but it didn’t seem that way to me then. I was hired to teach law to college students, another office I would never really move into, an apartment I would never move into, suitcases ready to go at a moment’s notice.
Neither crimes nor divorces nor treaties moved me.
I considered various roads back and forward. I wish I had gone then to see John Merrill; he would have known what to do.
But as always, no one I knew or spoke to had any notion of where I might go next.
Hajimemashite, Sara desu. No, there was no Japan. No Ochanomizu station on a hot summer afternoon, no Kagurazaka neighborhood in the evening.
Not surprisingly, I made a quick search of the soul for a particular place. I had to see the West of Ireland again.
A motif; Seanie, 1993
God, of all the motifs in all the world.
It wasn’t the first time during those years I had gone back, riding my bike in East Galway, wondering who I might meet along the road. I had visited now and again during those years; I had gone back whenever I had the chance, especially after Japan.
But this time, the summer after law school, the beginning of the 90s, it had a particular ferocity.
I was staying alone in a B & B above a pub in the town of Turlough. God knows why I thought Seanie Mannion looked like Peter O’Toole; recalling it now, there was no resemblance whatsoever. Well, he was lanky and slightly bent forward, if that qualifies. And he had that certain washed out look, and a ready roguish smile, if that qualifies.
I was sitting at a corner table on my own, one late afternoon. Seanie was sitting at the bar. An older man at the bar began to ask me questions; this made Seanie laugh. He asked where I was from; I answered, but he made as if he couldn’t hear me. He put his hand to his ear and moved down nearer to me.
I could tell immediately that he had a hesitation in his speech, a mild impediment, an unwelcome halting in midsentence. Mammy said my thoughts ran ahead of my talk, he told me later, though in retrospect that seems doubtful.
What do you do yourself? he asked me. My desire to simplify things is surely understandable.
You’ve more degrees than Mary Robinson so, he laughed when I had told him. Still, he was game.
It’s astonishing that I found him attractive, witty, a kind of romantic pal. I remember phoning Una to tell her I’d met a dead ringer for O’Toole as he once was, and wondering aloud what he would look like in a Panama hat.
It puts me in mind of that old television show, The Millionaire. The elderly gent, off camera, would hand his minion an envelope with someone’s name in it and say, Our next millionaire, Mike. Well, Seanie was, let’s say, in the right place at the right time.
I would move to Galway, the home place, for good, that was it. That was my next bright idea.
Seanie and I spent the next three weeks knocking around the place, wandering through fields and graveyards, sitting in his parked car of an evening and remarking how the sky never went truly dark on an Irish summer night.
It seemed a very long audition for a part in Playboy of the Western World.
It wasn’t the first time I’d gone looking to East Galway. I’d always said I wanted to be buried there, though long after I changed my mind on that.
Several years prior to meeting Seanie, soon after I realized Kido would not be coming, I went over to try and find Jerome, to be young and carefree again, to sit in the small lounge and listen to his tall tales. Instead, I found Manus, Nuala’s husband, in Jerome’s old seat in the corner.
Cat, my father’s dead, he said. You missed him by a few months. Then Manus and I cried together.
How imposing, how handsome, Manus seemed then. We made an elaborate plan to evade Nuala and meet on the road to Newbridge. We drove into the bog and kissed with total regret for everything one could think of. Manus had odd memories that came as a complete surprise to me; of being annoyed at me back when I was sixteen; racing around the countryside with boyfriends as I was.
The night before I was to leave we all sat together in the small lounge. Nuala was there as well. They had recently put televisions in the bars, and, oddly congruous, the movie Elvira Madigan was playing on one of the stations.
After law school, I’m not even sure I was in my right mind. At least I can say that Seanie was utterly free and unfettered, and ready to play at being the salt of the earth. The locals were surprised, it must be admitted. Who’s with Seanie? they’d ask, and get the land of their lives when they heard, or so I was told.
When I went back to my teaching job in western Massachusetts after the summer holiday in Galway, I spoke of Seanie all the time. My sweetheart, I called him. I wore a small locket he had given me; we spoke by phone every other day. I could always tell who it was when I lifted the receiver, as I heard only a swishing and swirling sound as Seanie attempted to speak and was met by his own hesitation.
He even wrote letters, with old-fashioned writing slanting down the page, filled with predictable sentiments. When will you be coming back to me, pet? he would write.
But in fact Seanie came to visit me in Massachusetts that Christmas. Sven and I met him at the airport; he approached us looking confused and woozy and I realized that, of course, he’d never really been away from home before. We went off through the lightly falling snow and met Una in a bar in Cambridge. She greeted Seanie joyfully, with a great hug and full approval. The first major pronouncement from Seanie, after he was asked by the young woman tending bar what he would like, was along the lines of I find that girl such a turn-off.
And so it went that Christmas, rescuing Seanie from bars, not being able to trust him to read a map and find his way back. It was the last Christmas Daddy was alive, and in all the photos he looks tired and ill, but smiling and genial as he struggled to figure Seanie out.
I can’t understand a word the boy is saying, he confessed to Gramma.
Still, Seanie at his best was good fun, and perfect in a crowd. Sven, Una, Seanie and I drove to the Cape Cod beaches, cold and deserted in the dead of winter, listening to Van Morrison, very faddish at the time, and stopping at warm and charming hotels for a quick brandy. Like Seanie or not—and I could never say I actually liked him—he lived up entirely to the designated motif.
After Seanie went back home, I continued to get his phone calls. It was like being phoned up by the West Wind, a breathy interval in which I would wait for him to say, Hello, darling. I turned towards East Galway like a sea turtle making the long, cold journey back to its original beach.
I set to work trying to find something I could do in Ireland. I would move to Galway, and that would be it. Or I could work in Dublin, or Cork—not Limerick, I couldn’t take it that far—and then go to Galway on weekends, and things would be settled for me. I would stand at attention again when they played the national anthem, A Soldier’s Song, after the last number in the pubs on a Saturday night. I would stand for the good old ways.
I heard there were international law teaching jobs on offer for the next fall in Dublin, and decided to give it a whirl. It isn’t likely, I told Seanie, but it’s no harm to try, is it?
No harm at all, peteen,
Seanie agreed genially.
As it happened, I was called over for an interview. The news arriving on official stationary with green seal, I was amazed to see that, for no reason that I understood, I had made it into the top list of candidates, and that I was being asked to appear before the academic hiring committee on such and such a date. I had no idea what to prepare, so I didn’t try. Seanie said he was over the moon about it.
The interview board was composed entirely of middle-aged men. They sat in a row on the opposite side of the table from me, in dark blue or pearl grey suits, pleasant enough to me, which should have acted as a tipoff that I was their girl, their choice. I had no clue what purpose I might serve for them, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t serve any.
We don’t need any family lawyers, you know, one silver-haired professor said. We have plenty of those.
Great stuff, was the gist of my reply. I do just about anything.
Back in Roscommon, I told Seanie that there was no chance in hell I would be offered that job. I didn’t know them; they didn’t know me; what had it all been about?
Never mind, pet, Seanie said, intending to comfort me.
And yet, astonishingly, the letter arrived in due course, informing me that I was the first choice of the committee, and announcing the terms of the position, and would I let them know by such and such a date whether I intended to accept.
1912; 1990s
I had been hearing something strange, in the months leading up to it. The faint noise woke me in the night; it sounded like a truck passing on a faraway highway, except that there was no highway near enough for me to hear. When I put my ear to the wall, it was even louder. A train, a car on the highway, the sad whistle of something moving in the night, but outside the town, across the valley, distinct, annoying, unending. I heard it every night, and it woke me every night.
After Daddy died, the sound stopped.
He woke one spring morning, a Monday, walked out to the kitchen in full expectation of things to come. He asked Gramma, What shall we do today, Ma? Then he fell sideways, and simply died. He died lying peacefully against the wall of the little Cape Cod house, with Gramma trying to say goodbye to him.
