It was all a gamble.
Mother and Son. Promenade Deck, SS Hibernia. Irish Sea, 1916.
We had one bright hour out on the promenade deck before the fog closed in. I still feel her grip on my hand, squeezing hard. Her hair streaming in cold bright wind.
I suddenly was afraid she was going to climb the rail and leap into the sea.
But maybe she wasn’t. Maybe it was a delusion, my delusion. Maybe it was the fever coming on.
Maybe what I really experienced on the steamer was the frightening, awe-inspiring sense we had been cut loose, were beyond sight of land, lost.
After all, what sort of woman, clutching the hand of her little boy, would actually consider climbing a ship’s rail and leaping out into the Irish Sea?
What sort of woman would consider stepping off a London bus into crowds, into oblivion?
Only a woman penniless in wartime. Only a woman traveling into exile. Only a woman who suspects, from redness around his eyes and a croak in his voice, that her son has a life-threatening bout of scarlet fever coming on. Only a woman whose husband is a prisoner, whose father is a tyrant. Only a woman exhausted by life.
The promised stipend had yet to come through. None of the portents were good. It might have seemed to her, hatless and wind whipped on the promenade deck, that the only way she’d ever free herself from the humiliation of her situation was to climb over the rail and quickly, before anyone could interfere, jump.
Did she imagine wrapping arms around me and taking me with her into the next world?
It’s possible she did, for a moment, and maybe that’s what stopped her. Maybe she was prepared to end her own life but not mine. And if she took the jump alone, what would become of me? An orphanage? In Dublin? I’d be handed over to my grandfather Joseph McDermott. She didn’t want her father raising her son.
It is April 1916. Most of her wardrobe has been pawned. She wears her best gray suit, the little jacket tightly buttoned at her waist. White blouse, black lisle stockings, boots. The hat she’s left inside, on one of the benches in the third-class cabin, is another of the insane and gorgeous hats of the prewar period, big enough to bathe a good-sized baby in. She bought it to wear to summer parties on the lawn at the Royal Yacht Squadron. She has pawned her wedding band but kept the hat. Of course the ring brought more than the hat would have, but perhaps her need for the hat is greater. The hat identifies her, at least to herself, as a woman of boldness, spirit, and taste. Someone who from girlhood has grasped that life can, must, be an adventure. A fine, bold possession, not to be thrown away or wasted.
The ship slipped into a fog bank. Bright sunlight snapped off abruptly, as though someone had pressed a switch. We retreated to our bench in the third-class cabin, where I slept fitfully, my head in her lap.
And that evening Eilín McDermott Lange, with her son, Billy, aka Herm the Germ, dragged their (minimal) baggage down a slick gangway in the oyster light of Kingstown, Ireland. A homecoming, it was, but it may have felt like exile to her. On the quay she touched my shoulder, and there we stood, uncertainly poised at the limit of her native country, like children who have come a long way on a hot day to bathe in a cool pond but hesitate at the water’s very edge, suddenly fearing what unseen creatures might be swimming and wriggling under the surface.
Everything I’m telling you is partly a dream, and so not to be trusted.
But I do possess a freakishly accurate memory for dates. It was Saturday, April 22, 1916, when Eilín and I stepped down onto the quay. About six o’clock in the evening. Easter Saturday. All over the country, bands of Irish Volunteers were arguing whether to go ahead with their planned Rising on Easter Monday, but of course we didn’t know that.
Right there on the bustling quay I fainted. I’d had enough of standing guard, and I went down like a stone. I had a raging fever and there was nothing for it but to get me under a roof as soon as possible and into a bed. A drayman was persuaded to take us, free of charge, to the Loreto Convent School, at Rathfarnham, where Eilín had once been a boarder. The nuns took us in, and we spent two weeks there, me isolated in the infirmary, while the Easter Rising played out in Dublin, with rebels occupying key buildings until the British Army moved in enough heavy artillery to blast them out and demolish a good chunk of central Dublin besides. I didn’t hear the guns. A pink-faced nun fed and bathed me and kept an eye on my fever, which went dizzily up and down. I recall the scratchy comfort of a red-and-black Hudson’s Bay blanket and a view from my sickroom window of rain clouds over the Dublin mountains.
Eilín must have been in touch with my grandmother Con, because as soon as I was strong enough to travel, an old admirer of Con’s, Sir Charles Butler, came to fetch us and bring us to Amiens Street Station.
Charlie Butler was an Anglo-Irish squire, owner of a famous racing stable, Knockmealdown Stud. He had been a classmate of Oscar Wilde at Portora Royal School. He was a bowlegged, red-faced squireen with a white mustache, very jolly and kind, and it was my first ride in a motorcar. We ran straight through the heart of the city, past the General Post Office which the rebels had held for nearly a week. The GPO was now a shell, and O’Connell Street—Sackville Street, as it was then—was heaps of rubble. The rebel leaders were being held in Kilmainham Gaol. Charlie Butler said they were all to be shot, even the women.
Dublin in its wreckage bustled with horse carts and motors. I saw boys picking through mountains of fresh rubble and soldiers in khaki ignoring the boys. Rubble has an odor, not pleasant—dust and damp all at once, and a sweet, slippery smell like rotten bananas. Eilín feared my lungs would be inflamed by the dust and tied a handkerchief around my mouth and nose.
She’d tried to leave behind war’s passions and hatred, yet here was her country’s capital in ruins, with everyone talking of prisoners and executions.
Charlie Butler hired a porter to sling our baggage aboard the mail train for Sligo. We shook hands with Butler, and he handed me a sovereign, which startled me.
“Now, Billy, old blade, you’ve never yet met your grandmother, I suppose?”
“I haven’t.”
“Well, you’re a lucky man, because you will. Your grandmama went round the Horn at nineteen with a baby in her belly, that being himself, your father.”
“I know.”
“When you see her, remember this: she likes a bold fellow. Likes a plunger. So you step up, bold as brass, kiss her the once, and say that’s from you. Then another, and tell her that’s from auld Charlie Butler to the handsomest woman in Ireland. Will you do it?”
“I will.”
“Good man.”
The sovereign meant a geometric increase in our funds, and Eilín made me hand it over as soon as we found our seats. On the journey we consumed the gorgeous picnic lunch Charlie Butler had provided in a wicker basket from his Kildare Street Club. After having eaten nothing for days except convent soup and dry toast, I was famished. At Muswell Hill, our boardinghouse rations tasted stale, mute, and tinny, and I understood that was the taste of war. But our feast aboard the Irish mail train—fresh ham sandwiches, biscuits, chocolate, even an orange to share, with lemonade for me and a bottle of porter for mother—was delicious, filling, and new.
Eilín hadn’t sent a telegram ahead—didn’t want to pay for it, I suppose, so there was no one to meet us when we got off at Sligo. Luckily, the stationmaster recognized her.
“You’re the daughter of himself. You’re the German.”
“I’m not. But I’m married to the German.” And she stared at him hard, daring him to call us a pair of Huns. He didn’t. Instead he told a farmer who was collecting steel milk cans off the train to take us out to Strandhill in his jaunting car.
A couple of miles out, on the road to the sea, we drew up in front of a red villa. I saw an iron fence, a bricked stable yard to the side, and a small coach house peeking out from behind the main house, which had a tower in one corner. I hoped it signified a castle.
The red house really was just a su
burban villa, built in the 1880s. My grandfather bought the house from the Pollexfens, W. B. Yeats’s mother’s family, and my mother and her two sisters grew up there. Eilín and her two younger sisters, Kate and Frances, had been packed off to school at the Loretos at Rathfarnham and only brought back to Strandhill when their mother was dying.
When he was a bachelor my grandfather had spent a summer learning Irish on the Irish-speaking island of Inishmor, where he seduced Noirín Flaherty, sixteen-year-old daughter of a fisherman. She wore an island woman’s red cloak and cowhide slippers and had never slept a night anywhere but Inishmor until my grandfather, under violent threat from her brothers, married her and brought her to Sligo, where my mother was born seven and half months later.
Noirín never stopped mourning her island life, and died at Sligo when she was thirty-five, leaving Eilín and her two sisters motherless.
When she was very old, my mother insisted her father had never loved her mother; he’d only loved her beautiful Irish. He’d required Eilín and her sisters to speak Irish at home, even though Sligo was an English-speaking town.
In the jaunting car Eilín and I sat facing each other. She had pinned some sort of rubberized weatherproof material over her hat. I was getting soaked. I was gazing at the house, but my mother had her back to it and would not look around, even after the farmer had climbed down and was reaching for our baggage.
On the Strandhill Road in the rain, her independent life and her marriage must have seemed awfully distant, a life that had belonged to someone else.
Through dripping rain, I study her face under the tremendous hat. I’m not sure she’s seeing me. She twists at the finger where her wedding band ought to be, but isn’t. She wants back the life she founded on her voyage outward from Sligo, her position in Germany, her marriage. She misses the context and comradeship of marriage. She wants my father in her story, but he has unaccountably dropped from the narrative, or at least he’s gone mute. He’s watching birds flutter outside the barbed wire on Ally Pally hill. For a year she’s passed through that wire on monthly, then weekly, visits. She’s poured tea for prominent suffragists, waited on their tables, and attempted to persuade her son that the particles he saw sputtering in the night sky over north London were not, in fact, human beings on fire. She has washed up on the shore of her native country with a feverish boy and barely enough money for train fare. She has had to accept charity from her old schoolteachers.
Probably every damp mile out along the Strandhill Road there had been something to remind her that in this part of the world she’d never known what freedom was.
Silver rain. Green hedge. Blackness of wet road. Haunches of a bony old cart horse, soaked and glistening.
The red villa seemed magnificent to me. I was keen to meet my relations. I assumed they would adore me.
On her own she could have handled London. She’d returned only for my sake.
“Well, here we are,” she said.
She sounded surprised, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she had done. As if our journey had been a dream, and now we were waking up.
Our stipend would eventually arrive at the Sligo Post Office: two pounds seven shillings and fourpence, paid every month, for the duration of the war.
In another moment my two young aunts burst out of the house and made a great fuss over us, laughing, hugging, kissing. It was as much physical contact as I had ever had in my life. Meanwhile the farmer pulled our two bags inside and courteously refused the coin that Aunt Frances offered in payment.
“Oh, you must take it!” Frances cried.
“I cannot, no.”
“You must!”
“I won’t.”
The farmer won that tussle and went off triumphantly sans shilling. Aunt Frances was black haired, blue eyed, the practical one who managed the housekeeping and did most of the cooking. At first I hoped she might be some sort of (very pretty) witch, always experimenting with recipes and medicaments, seething strange herbs in pots over the stove.
Aunt Kate, the youngest sister, loved fine things and intended to marry a rich man.
Soon we were all in the warm kitchen with a fire groaning in the nickel-plated range. They filled a copper tub with hot water, peeled off my wet clothes, put me in it. The little housemaid, Grainne, scrubbed me while the sisters chattered. Then we all had tea. I was wrapped in a blanket and settled in a chair close to the stove with a plate of scones smeared with butter and honey. A sepia-tinted, postcard-sized photograph of Eilín and Buck as newlyweds on the lawn at Sanssouci was passed around, and my aunts remarked how handsome he was, and what a wonderful house, and how unfair that poor Buck was locked up for being a German, which he couldn’t help.
The controversy over the possibility of Irishmen being conscripted into the British Army was just beginning, and my grandfather was up in Fermanagh to deliver an anticonscription speech. He would travel all over the northwest for the next two and a half years, making speeches.
Kate was surprised to hear their father had not responded to Eilín’s letter from London. She said he had certainly intended to write a letter inviting us, but it must have slipped his mind. “He’s only gotten worse since the fight in Dublin. He made a Republican speech before the city council and might go to jail. He’s not changed. He’s all ideas and politics and caring for no one but himself, really.”
We had supper in the chilly dining room. Leg of lamb and boiled potatoes. I couldn’t eat the lamb, it was too strong, but I feasted on buttery potatoes sprinkled with salt and parsley. Afterward my mother and “the girls” settled back in the kitchen, drinking tea, while Grainne did the washing up. I was allowed to stay because the aunts were in love with me, and my bedroom was in the attic, a long way from the kitchen’s bustle and warmth.
I felt surrounded and admired. The red villa was so much cozier and nicer than our boardinghouse in Muswell Hill.
The sisters were looking through Eilín’s album of Sanssouci photographs when they heard their father entering the house.
“Go and greet him, Ellie. Bow and scrape to the chief, otherwise the pair of you will never get on.”
My aunts wanted Eilín and my grandfather to get along. They wanted us to stay. They wanted a child in the house to break the mental siege of life with their demanding and lawless parent. I felt the depth of their affection and was already taking it as my due.
My mother went out to greet her father. The little maid Grainne hummed and grunted while scouring pots and pans.
A few minutes later the door swung open, and a very tall old man with streaming white hair stalked into the kitchen, followed by my mother. He wore a tweed ulster coat that smelled like a wet dog. Frances and Kate leaped to their feet and he kissed them. The soles of his boots made a crackle on the flagstones. Grainne was making a clatter with the pans. He kissed her.
That kiss infuriated my aunts and my mother. Even I sensed it. Grainne ignored him and kept on scouring. Standing barefoot on the kitchen flags she was quite small, and probably no more than sixteen or seventeen.
My grandfather stood before me saying something in a language I didn’t understand. He switched to English. His voice was smooth, cogent, and musical.
“Are you the gentleman called Hermann Lange?”
Except for the schoolteacher at Muswell Hill, adults had always been my protectors. I wasn’t shy with adults. It was other children I was wary of.
“I am. But that is not my real name.”
“Isn’t it? What, sir, is your real name?”
“I am Billy Lange, for the duration.”
“Are you glad to be here, sir? Are these women treating you well?”
“They are.”
He stared at me a moment longer, then he turned and left the kitchen. A few moments later the maid Grainne put away the last of the pans, dropped a quick curtsy to the three sisters, and followed him out. I fell asleep and was carried up to the attic bedroom I shared with Kate, next to the tiny garret where Grainne slept wh
en she wasn’t in my grandfather’s bed.
1938
The efficient laundry at the Hotel Adlon dried and folded Karin’s clothes, and the maid repacked everything in the surviving suitcase. It was Sunday morning, but Karin telephoned her partner Stefan Koplin first thing and arranged to meet him at their office. She wore a green suede jacket and a smart black-and-white frock made by her Berlin dressmaker, Lulu, an expatriate Parisienne with a trope for dazzling Japanese prints. Karin still wore her hair in a blunt, thick bob, with bangs nearly shrouding her eyes, a style that marked allegiance to the Berlin of the late 1920s.
She and Kop spent most of the day huddled over her desk, reviewing files, making notes, and telephoning all her Jews while I sat at another desk reading newspapers and doing crossword puzzles. Our train left at four o’clock, but she kept delaying: always one last file that needed to be discussed and annotated, one more telephone call that had to be made. I was starting to worry we’d never make the train. And I’d blown through all my cash, every last mark except for train fare, so where were we going to spend another night in Berlin? Certainly not at the Adlon. I was tapped out.
“Karin, we have to go.”
“Yes, yes, another minute.”
“Karin, we must go now!”
At last she stood up and shrugged on her coat. I lugged her suitcase into the rattletrap elevator and we rode down in creaky silence. Poor Koplin came with us.
Out on the street I shook hands with the fat little lawyer, then turned my attention to flagging down a taxi.
“Auf Wiedersehen, dear Kop!” Karin embraced him. “Please, please, dear man, watch out for yourself!”
“Never you mind about me!” Kop shouted as we were climbing into our taxi. “Keep your papers in order—that’s all I say! All happiness in the New World!”
Carry Me Page 8
