The Last Cadillac

by Nancy Nau Sullivan

  “How many for dinner, madame?”

  My mother clasped her hands, the queen of the castle. She had no trouble filling that chair. “Ten, I believe” she said, smiling at Oona.

  “That will be grand,” Oona said.

  That evening, we ate fresh salmon with homemade mayonnaise and buttered potatoes, all garnished with fresh dill—a dinner so memorable, yet so simply prepared. I’ve never thought of fish and potatoes again in quite the same way. She carried the impossibly large tray—a tiny, straight little lady, always dressed in a uniform of a navy cardigan sweater, wool skirt, tights, and sensible shoes. Her expression never changed much; she didn’t smile a lot, but when she did, a light went on behind those clear blue eyes.

  “I trust her entirely. She’s the treasure of the castle,” the knight told my mother. “Please, you mustn’t push her too much.”

  I suppose we did—not on purpose—but because of our sheer, outrageous delight in spending our days there. Oona was gracious at our delight. Nothing ruffled her, not even when the number of guests topped out at fourteen. I slept in a blue satin bedroom with a four-poster bed and wide windows that overlooked a stretch of gardens. Mick Jagger had more or less occupied the very same bedroom.

  “A desperate-looking fellow, he was,” said Nancy, the cook. “I couldn’t take my eyes off him.” He’d jumped on the bed and broke it, and the knight replaced it well before my arrival.

  Ireland was a place in our hearts and a place of great family memories.

  “Ireland?” Dad said. Immediately, his shoulders shook up and down in anticipation of a good cry. His emotions floated so easily to the surface in bouts of tears, especially on the subject of Ireland.

  I reached over and shook Dad a little. Sometimes, that brought him back to earth.

  “What do you say? About going to Ireland?”

  “Yes, yes, let’s go, let’s go.” A smile broke across his face. He let out a good, loud laugh. “I’d sure like to go to the pub and belly up to the bar. At least one more time.”

  Little Sunshine was delighted to go, but Tick said he couldn’t make it, not with soccer and guitar and “plans” on his agenda.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “Just what are these plans?”

  “Oh, you know, Mom, just plans. Stuff comes up. I’ll be fine. I can stay at Tony Mark’s.”

  He was pulling away from me. I could feel it again, but I also felt that I had to trust him. Trust had to start somewhere, and it was about time. Tick was just this side of fifteen years old.

  “Well, I guess so. You are busy, and you’d better stay busy with school and practice.” I tried to sound stern, but it was difficult with this engaging kid who had taken on a lot of adventure in just a couple of years. He always threw himself into his plans, including teaching himself to play the guitar. His instructor, George, told me that Tick had a technique more promising than B.B. King’s. I didn’t know much about technique, but I could hear what was going on in that tiny laundry-room-turned-bedroom. I stood outside his door sometimes and wondered: Where did that come from? Tick was full of rude and lovely surprises, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way, because then I wouldn’t have him at all. My Island Boy. Tick will be fine.

  Little Sunshine dug right into the business of planning the trip. She did a collage for school with family pictures from Ireland—pictures of castles and pubs and gardens that we photographed years before she was even born. She twisted her long chestnut hair into a knot on top of her head and practiced her Irish dancing until she nearly tapped a hole in her hard shoes. She’d taken Irish dance lessons at the Trinity school in Chicago—and so had Tick. They’d both been in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, wearing their Aran Islands sweaters, freezing to death, and glad of it. Florida was so different, a place of swimming, year-round sports, and bike riding, with not the remotest connection to their Midwestern roots. My daughter—and Tick—left a life behind, and, I hoped, were getting the most out of The Adventure.

  “Girl, are you going to take that act on tour?” I said, watching her dance to the wild, repetitive strings and squeezebox of the reel. Laughing, she kicked her legs and kept her arms straight at her sides.

  “Mom! Why not?”

  Little Sunshine, Dad, and I planned to fly over with Lucy’s team from the hotel. And then Lucy called and said she couldn’t go.

  An enormous amount of convention business came into the hotel all at once, and it required booking ASAP. Lucy was tied down. She said it was a great idea for me to go ahead and take Dad anyway.

  “Why not?” she said. “What the hell?”

  “Sounds like it to me. I don’t think I can take a ten year old and an old man in a wheelchair to Ireland by myself.”

  “That doesn’t sound like my old sister Nan,” said Lucy.

  I asked my other siblings if they would like to go with us. They told me I was nuts, taking a be-stroked man across the ocean on an airplane to God-knows-where once you get there, if you get there. That was the sum of their thoughts on the matter. Besides, they said, the winter weather in Ireland was always especially grim.

  “It’ll be too cold to play tennis,” brother Jack said. The weather also mattered to my sister, Julia. “I’d go if it were warmer.”

  My daughter, however, was not discouraged. “I can do it, Mom.”

  We could do this. Our ancestors crossed the Atlantic in the bottom of those awful ships. I didn’t have a clue about hardship, about giving birth in the freezing lower deck next to the engine room, such as the case of great Aunt Margaret and cousin Timothy, who made it after all. We could do this, even if Little Sunshine and I had to wheel Dad all over Ireland and I had to prop him up at the bar for that Paddy whiskey and a glass of Harp.

  Dad’s doctors—the neurologist and the urologist—said Dad was able to travel to Ireland. Then we paid a visit to the family doctor. This would be the test, because if Dr. Gordon said we could go, then we could go.

  Dad sat on a little metal stool with his hands folded and a smile on his face when Dr. Gordon breezed into the small office, taking up the entire room with his large, white-coated presence. He was a lively ebullient man who used his right arm to make a point.

  “Ireland! Well, why not?” he said. “It might even do you all some good.”

  I liked him because he took care of Dad with gentility and humor, and a good dose of common sense. The more I got involved in the medicine of old age, I was seeing less and less of that.

  Dr. Gordon recommended saline nasal spray and antinausea pills, antacids, and Tylenol for the flight. Then his jowls deflated. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Don’t forget the diapers. You’ll play hell getting diapers over there, and what about getting him in and out of the restrooms? What about the airplane?” He hardly made eye contact then. “Oh, mercy!”

  But I’d already made up my mind.

  He shook his head, gave Dad a hearty pat on the back, and waved in my direction, all the while opening the office door to escape. “Well, good luck!” He was out the door with the flip of a chart.

  I wanted to make the trip as comfortable as possible. I did my research and found a driver who would pick us up at the airport and take us around, and we kept all of our prior reservations made through Lucy. The staff at the Shelbourne Hotel had a reputation for hospitality, like all the Irish. I called the agent at the hotel to discuss our situation. She cheered me on. “Oh, it will be brilliant,” she said in lilting Irish laughter. “You bring your dad and the wee one and come on now. It’ll be foin.”

  The flight was remarkably calm. We slept through most of it, except for Dad, who said he didn’t sleep at all, even though he snored with his large, white head resting on the pillow and his legs tucked under a blue fleece blanket. Getting back and forth to the bathroom was a production, but we made it with relative ease—and limited liquid intake.

  Our driver, John McCrory, met us in baggage claim at the airport in Dublin. He looked exactly like I thought he would: tall
with silver hair and a strong jaw, and a twinkle in his eye. He held a tweed cap in one hand and wore a long black coat. He gave me a crisp nod and a big smile, and he and Dad shook hands, John bending slightly to Dad who presided in a wheelchair like arriving royalty. They became fast friends on the spot. Little Sunshine danced amid the confusion, with the luggage and tourists and the blaring of announcements.

  I relaxed, but we had a long way to go.

  John rolled Dad along in the wheelchair to a large black Mercedes, put Dad in the front seat, and loaded the luggage in the trunk. With dispatch, he said, “So there,” and we were off to the Shelbourne. It wasn’t a long ride, but it was a welcome breather to drink in the cozy rows of stucco houses that gave way to the big city of small whizzing cars driving with abandon. Dublin, on the outskirts, looked like London—or Chicago and New York—but then the city revealed its distinctive Georgian architecture of classic grey stone buildings with enormous, bright green, blue, or red doors and gleaming brass fittings. Frosted nineteenth-century street lamps festooned with seahorses and leaves. Black iron gates opening to spotless alleyways.

  We pulled up to the hotel overlooking St. Stephen’s Green, surrounded by Georgian townhouses with the doors of Dublin. On that February afternoon, midday walkers bundled in tweed ambled briskly around the pots of winter flowers, brilliant under a patch of silver sky shining through very tall trees. An old woman was feeding the birds.

  John McGrory and Eddy, the doorman, lifted Dad out of the car and into the wheelchair. A minute later, two men arrived with an instant ramp so they could roll Dad into the hotel. Then, the helpers disappeared. I followed Little Sunshine up a few steps from the damp street into the lobby, where a fire crackled at the hearth. Little Sunshine landed on a heap of luggage piled neatly on the well-worn carpeting. More polished brass planters and vases full of flowers splashed the small lobby with deep purple, yellow, shades of red, so lush I wanted to pinch them.

  “Mom! Look!” said Little Sunshine. She rubbed her hands together in front of the fire and wiggled among the suitcases. Her eyes beamed at a silver tray of tiny sandwiches and fruit and almond petits fours on a marble table off the lobby. A small woman in a black dress with starchy white cuffs and collar poured hot chocolate into china cups for a young couple seated on a small divan.

  Just in time for tea. I smiled and nodded at Little Sunshine, then turned to the receptionist who slid some paperwork toward me. “We are so happy to see you.” John was back and chatting with Dad, and it didn’t look like I could pry them apart. But I finally got John’s ear. We made tentative plans to meet some time later in the week to take a tour around Dublin.

  So far so good. We’ve made it well into the first day.

  “Oh, the gale was blowin’ for days til just last night,” said Eddy. He busied himself with the luggage cart. “Until ye landed, it was frightful. But now it looks like it might clear up for ye a bit.”

  Good weather often followed me. My luck changed through the years, due entirely to some quirk of nature, and prayer. It simply happened, and after growing up in gloomy stretches of cold, snowy weather, this could only mean a fortunate turn of events. Through the lobby doors, the sky over St. Stephen’s shone with a streak of gold in the silver. It was a good omen.

  “Yes, the weather,” I said. “The rain is soft in Ireland. I like it very much.”

  “Ye do, do ye?” he said, as he finished loading the cart. “Still, we’ll see if we can’t order ye some proper weather for yeer holiday.” I tipped him, and he tipped his hat in return.

  In Ireland, holiday and vacation are the same (that is, any time off), and the Irish are adept at helping visitors experience their holiday. They tell jokes and pour Guinness. They stop whatever they are doing to take the lost and confused to wherever they are headed, even if it means giving up some precious time. And inevitably, a brief encounter with any one of our Irish hosts gets down to the question of the day: “Have ye been to see the Great Mouse at the Disney?”

  Our adjoining rooms overlooked St. Stephen’s Green. I pulled back the heavy blue silk drapery and stared at a wide view of treetops, carriages, and traffic six stories below. Dad and Little Sunshine were already down for a nap, but I was wide awake, poking at the damask bedcovers, stacking underwear in the polished mahogany dresser. I drifted over to the window again and looked down at the busy street and into the park where splashes of primroses, fuchsia, and alyssum bloomed everywhere. It was late February, but the soft rains and temperate climate made all of Ireland a regular garden year-round. A horse carriage clip-clopped past the hotel, and taxis and walkers crisscrossed the paths among the hedges. In my head, hours of jet engines still droned away. I needed to sleep, but I couldn’t lie down and let all that life down in Dublin swirl around without me. I left a note for Little Sunshine and went down the lift for a short walk.

  It was not a holiday for most Dubliners. Rushing workers were swinging briefcases, weaving in and out of Grafton Street, faces set. It was time for many of them to be getting off the job. I bustled along like one of them and mingled with trench-coated girls with short, dark hair and fresh, ruddy white faces. Clutching my long green gabardine coat around me, I wove through the crowd and reveled in the moist, temperate Irish air. They looked at me and I looked back at my kinsmen and women, knowing I was one of them, but not knowing any of them. I thought, how crazy it is to be here, and how I’d always be reminded of the brisk pace, the rough red face of an old man in the doorway, smoking and eyeing the crowd leisurely, the young man hurrying as fast as he could to the pub or home, the young mother wiping cracker crumbs tenderly from the pink face of a cherub in a stroller. The baby dropped the cracker and the mother picked it up, brushed it lightly and handed it back to the small, outstretched fingers. “Here ye be,” she said, and she caught me smiling.

  At dinner, Dad drank and ate everything he could get his hands on, especially the Harp and soda bread slathered in sweet butter. Little Sunshine called it “non-stop chewing,” though she wasn’t much different than her grandfather in that department, and neither was I. Over the course of several days, we ate in the dining room of the Shelbourne, at the Clarence Hotel tearoom (hoping to see Bono. We didn’t), and at the King Sitric north of Dublin on the sea. In short order, we ate our way through heaps of bread and scones, sole and plaice, creamy vegetable soups, hot chips, baby greens, galia melons and pastry, with a river of tea, Harp, Cork gin, and hot chocolate.

  One night, while Dad slept upstairs, my daughter ate chicken sandwiches and lemon cookies, and I drank an Irish coffee in the hotel lounge. Our favorite spot was a sofa near the fireplace. We listened to the piano player. We talked to the staff when it got very late and the crowd thinned out. We stared at the Waterford crystal chandelier as big as Cinderella’s coach, and we wondered out loud about all the people who had been reflected a million times over in its tiny prisms. We studied the symmetrical arrangement of paintings that hung on nearly forty feet of wall as we tried out different sofas and chairs. From the windows in the lounge, we took pictures of the horses and carriages clomping by beyond the flower boxes under the hotel windows. We watched well-dressed men and women, young and old, talking with their hands, and we made up stories about what they did all day. We wrote in our journals and brought our books down to the sitting areas we appropriated, hanging out at the Shel-bourne like it was the usual thing to do.

  Then one evening, my daughter wore hot pink velvet overalls and a sweater to match. The young woman on the sofa across from us said, “How pink pink pink you are.”

  Her boyfriend said, “Your piercing blue eyes are quite lovely tonight.”

  Sunshine laughed and bounced onto the sofa. Mary was a shop girl who worked in a boutique on a chic Dublin alley, and she liked to rove around the city with her boyfriend, Declan.

  “Alley? You work in the alley?” my daughter asked. Her eyes opened wide, imagining the beautiful Mary with white skin and short black hair toiling away in an alley.

&nbs
p; Declan chuckled. “It’s not one of your dark places, you know, where the garbage piles up for the rats and such. We call it an alley, or the mews. Years ago, the carriage drivers used these small side streets to park their horses inside the wide doors under living quarters,” he said. “Now, many of these alleys are places for fancy wankers in their fancy shops and row houses.”

  Mary gave him a poke and laughed. “Ah, don’t be callin’ me a wanker.”

  “Not you, me love.” He wrapped his arm around her and gave her a squeeze, then he kissed her on the cheek. He had the honed features and endearing, disheveled look of an artist. In fact, he was an artist, working part-time to support his habit of splashing paint on canvas in his tiny studio. I guessed they were both about twenty-five, if not younger.

  “What’s a wanker?” asked my daughter.

  “Someone who is puttin’ on airs—someone full up to here,” said Declan, putting a hand over one dark eyebrow. I took another large sip of my Paddy whiskey and hot coffee, and leaned over to choose a piece of pound cake, which I needed like another thigh. I offered the platter to Mary.

  “Mom, I think we’re wankers.”

  “I hope not,” I said. We all burst into laughter.

  “Aye, and you’re not,” said Mary. “You’re loooove-ly.”

  They left soon after that. Having such a delightful time, I didn’t notice that it got to be past midnight.

  “It’s like being in a story, isn’t it, Mom?”

  “What is?”

  “Being here,” she said. “We’re in this very exciting story, and the people are walking around and talking in it.”

  “And we’re turning the pages, aren’t we?”

  “I’d sure like to know how it turns out.”

  I had no idea how things would turn out for us, but we had our imaginations. My daughter and I made up a fine destiny for Mary and Declan. She got out of the alley and wore a silver dress to her wedding at Waterford Castle where the green candles lit up a crystal stairway decked out in white roses, after which Declan sold his fabulous paintings to kings and museums, and the Silver Princess and the Artist lived happily ever after with one boy and one girl, who bore a striking resemblance to Tick and Little Sunshine. The girl had freckles and danced a lot, and the boy played the guitar and was a true Viking. We needed some work on the end of it, and we finally agreed—very tired by then—how very far away the adventure of our story had carried us from Florida and all around Ireland and back to the lounge at the Shel-bourne under the crystal ball of a chandelier.