•
Our stick horses whinny and rear up on their hind legs before setting off again at a gallop. All four of us kids are riding back and forth the length of the backyard, our hearts beating faster and harder with each turn.
•
I cross a bridge over the Liffey. I wander, looking into shop windows, now and again going in. Inside a dark secondhand shop, a double brass picture frame faces the window, its two glass ovals refracting daylight. All the other frames lined up around it display photographs, mostly old sepias and watery black-and-whites, formal portraits of ordinary-looking people. But only dry dark blue velvet backing shows through the glass ovals of the double frame. How perfect it would be for the photos when they arrive.
“It came from a house near Dún Laoghaire Harbor,” the proprietor, a soft old figure of an Irishwoman, says to me from another dim aisle where she is dusting porcelain. She explains that the winds over the Irish Sea likely caused the brass to go green with oxidation.
That adds to its appeal for me. It has been inundated with molecules of sea air.
“Oh,” I say, picturing the double frame facing out a second-floor open window, two black-and-white pictures of my parents within it, their smiling faces gazing out at incoming tides. I reach for it. It is surprisingly heavy, its cool surfaces heating in response to my fingers. Its weight impresses me. It could be a kind of home for the pictures, hold them in place. But when I see the price on the back, I return it to its spot on the shelf and stroll slowly away from it. The only customer in the shop, I pause before archaic objects on display: a bellows for a fire, a fire screen carved with Celtic knot-work, a serving platter painted with leaping stags. But I only half look at these things. I am seeing my parents’ faces in the double frame, the perpetually moving ocean reflecting on the glass.
“You’re an American,” the proprietor observes, though I haven’t spoken more than a single word to her.
“Yes,” I say and smile. Few Irish girls I’ve seen in Dublin, or even in the West, wear their hair long and untended as I do.
I gravitate back to the double frame, drawn to its solidity, two safe windows hinged permanently together, through which each could look, and through which each could be regarded.
“That was in the same house well over a century.”
I jump slightly. The proprietor stands about a foot behind me, her slow brogue a persuasive music in the enclosed silence of the room. “But no one owns it now.”
Her proximity unsettles me. I do not have the money to buy it.
I look at her guiltily, the lenses of her glasses, like the double frame, reflecting the light through the window.
I feel her disappointment as I thank her and leave.
Outside it occurs to me that it probably wasn’t my long, straight hair that gave me away as an American. I’ve seen plenty of Scandinavian and German girls at the youth hostels and elsewhere who wear their hair long and loose.
I’ve been told that Americans come to Ireland looking for touchstones to the past, mooning after connections to a lost ancestral home. I moved through her shop of antiquated things as if I were in church.
•
It’s dark out as the four of us board the Ferris wheel, our last ride of the day at the New Mexico State Fair. The car we’re in ascends as kids board other cars. We stop for a long time when we’re at the top of the wheel. Jerry rocks us back and forth. Everything looks beautiful from up here, all the colored lights of the fairgrounds below, and above and around us, the stars. Through the metal screen enclosure, I can see Mom and Dad far down on the ground below, two shadows looking up at us.
•
I venture one day to the theater department at Trinity College for advice about how to audition for plays in Dublin, and speak to a professor who encourages me to join the weekly Sunday acting group at the Focus, a highly regarded company that does Chekhov and Ibsen in a tiny, decrepit theater in Pembroke Alley near Leeson Street. It is led by a famous Dubliner, Deirdre O’Connell, an eccentric figure in long black dresses and shawls, her voluminous red hair always pinned up in the style of a Gibson girl. She studied at the Actors Studio in New York and fosters a Stanislavsky approach, similar to what Kim Stanley taught.
I am among a group of fifteen that meets weekly, a training period for possible company work. We do a variety of movement and improvisational exercises in a convivial atmosphere, both playful and serious. It is like sustenance to me, and I revel in every moment of the four hours I spend there each Sunday. I become friends with the other actors, three in particular. My Dublin life begins to fall into place.
•
Near the end of August, the IRA assassinates British admiral Lord Mountbatten in Sligo, and a few days later, while visiting dignitaries are on O’Connell Street, there is a bomb threat.
I am enlisted to stand at the door of the Harp and check ladies’ purses for guns and bombs. I look at the manager who has given me the order, a plump, thirtysomething man named Paddy, and ask, “Me?”
“Yes,” he says and won’t explain why I have been picked. So I have to do it, stand there and ask ladies to open their purses so I can look inside them. Men aren’t searched. It’s ridiculous. Someone says that I’ve been picked to do it because I’m a Yank, that people might be intimidated by an American accent. Between that and the long hours and low wages, I decide I have to find something better.
It is through someone at the Focus Theatre that I hear about a waitress job at Dobbins Wine Bistro, a Bohemian kind of place, where the hours are shorter and the money much better than anything I could make at the Harp.
I go for an interview and get the job.
It is a continental yet laid-back atmosphere, with flagstone floors and rustic exposed brick walls, a menu that offers seafood and steaks, and an extensive wine list.
After two four-hour dinner shifts, I make in wages and tips almost what I made in six nine-hour days at the Harp. I’ll be able to put away a few pounds here and there for Yeats country.
I become close with another waitress at Dobbins, Letty Le Jeune, a sculptor, four years older than I am. Tall and dark-haired, she has the same propensity for silliness. On a slow night, we place a lit cigarette into the mouth of a whole salmon lying on a bed of greens on the salad bar. We watch the customers perusing the display to see their reactions. Most look askance at the salmon, smoke issuing from the cigarette. Some blink and stare a few moments, then dismiss it. After each reaction, Letty and I look away, stifling our laughter.
A tipsy woman weaves her way to the salad bar and lets out a surprised yelp, turns to us, and says, “Do you think if I asked him, he’d let me borrow that?”
I extract the cigarette from the fish’s mouth and present it to her. Smiling, she hesitates a moment, then grabs it, takes a puff, and hands it back to me.
Letty and I sometimes go out to the pub after work, laugh a lot, then get into intense conversations about our artistic dreams, her about sculpture and me, acting.
•
After Trojan Women closes and I am making waitressing money again, I go to Doodlet’s, a novelty shop downtown, and buy presents for Tracy and Sheila: a Russian wool scarf, green with bright red roses, for Sheila; a necklace for Tracy, small painted tin watermelon halves linked together. I drive to Albuquerque to see them.
Jerry is visiting them when I arrive.
Because I don’t have a television, I am not familiar with Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which the three of them keep referring to, red-faced and laughing. “There’s a penguin on the telly!” Tracy cries in a high-pitched Cockney accent.
“Nudge, nudge, wink, wink!” Sheila responds.
“A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind man!” Tracy counters back.
Jerry bellows in a deep voice, “I beg your pahhhhh-don!”
•
After working a lunch shift, I walk toward Temple Bar, and cross the Liffey at O’Donovan Rossa Bridge. Someone has told me about a tourist shop there where I might find
out about tours to Yeats country. The travel agent is busy with a demanding customer but gives me a pamphlet with all sorts of information about various tours and accommodations in Yeats country. When I leave, I turn onto a narrow cobblestone street and find myself in front of the little store where I saw the double frame.
I stand at the window with a racing heart, hesitating, then go in.
Again, I am alone, the only customer. She is there, the proprietor, with her dust cloth, wiping a candlestick. The frame is in the same place, without photographs in it. The envelope of pictures still has not arrived, but I hold out hope. The postal strike has made a mess of things, but I’ve heard lots of stories about letters and packages long overdue suddenly appearing. I lift the frame, feeling its substantial weight. I hold it very close and study the delicate leafwork.
The proprietor comes near and says the same things she said to me a month before, as if time had stood still in this shop: that the frame had been in the same house many years facing out at the sea, that the sea air caused the brass to oxidize. Turning it around, I hope that since it hasn’t sold, the cost might be less, but it is the same. If I spend the money on it, it will take up almost all of my savings for Yeats country.
Always when I’ve thought of Yeats country, I’ve imagined a distant, barely audible chorus of voices filling the air over Ben Bulben or Lough Gill, a chorus that portends a miracle. Now as I stand there in the shop, I hear that chorus, but there’s an element of discord in it.
I feel afraid, not of the Yeats country I see in the pamphlet I hold in my hand, but of the one that lives in my imagination, the Yeats country where I expect to find redemption.
“I could have cleaned the green from the brass,” the woman says. “That could have been tended to.” Her hair is very white and soft like floss and her eyes behind the lit screens of her glasses are dark blue, like lapis. “But that green has a beauty, doesn’t it? It’s one of the things that draws you to the frame.”
When she touches my shoulder, my eyes go damp. She knows me, I think.
“Am I right?” she asks.
When I say yes, she smiles and I am convinced for some reason that she is going to embrace me, but she remains where she is.
I imagine that she has the answer. If I ask her, she might tell me why I am afraid to go to Yeats country. She might reassure me, and whatever this notion is that is paralyzing me will let go.
“Do you want to buy it?” she asks, breaking my daze.
Without thinking I give a nod and she takes the frame from me and turns. I follow her to the cash register, where I watch her wrap it in paper and tie it with coarse string.
I can still explain that I can’t really afford it. No harm has been done. She can still unwrap it. But she touched my shoulder. It matters to her that I am buying it, and I cannot bear to disappoint her. I have my most recent pay packet from Dobbins in my purse.
I leave the shop carrying my parcel and walk without direction on the cobblestone streets. I begin to wonder if Yeats country is for me what Ireland was for my father, a place outside of time, one that must remain safe in the realm of myth. Castles engulfed in mist. Hazel woods with deer that are never hunted.
•
On our way to Carlsbad Caverns in southern New Mexico, we stop at White Sands Missile Range, white drifts of sand as far as the eye can see. The wind is high. The sand crests and runs like waves. We dance in circles and roll down the peaks as Mom lifts the camera to her eye.
Sheila squats and takes a handful of the white sand. As Mom focuses and clicks, the wind blows the sand from between Sheila’s fingers.
•
I put the frame on the little faux mantel in my room. Even with no pictures in it, it suggests my parents to me. The dark blue velvet backing behind each glass is scattered with minute flecks of white dust or lint, so they look like two night skies.
•
Dusk at Carlsbad Caverns, we stand in suspense with a crowd of other tourists. Bats fly out of the dark mouth of rock and ascend, like endless swarms of insects against the purple clouds.
•
I focus on auditions, trying to carve out a future for myself as an actress in the Dublin theater. I go to an audition for something that I think will be perfect for me, a play called Hollywood B Movie. It goes well, and afterward the director, who it turns out is from the States, takes me aside and tells me that an actress who works steadily with the company is already cast, and that most of the roles have been cast in advance and auditions are just for show. That, he tells me, is the case in many of the auditions. The Dublin theater world is a small, closed circle. Still, he says, it is good that I came. He likes my work and says he’ll keep me in mind for future productions. He gives me the names of two other local directors, and I have meetings with them. If something right for me comes up, each of them says, they’ll let me know.
•
I send Denis several letters and don’t hear back from him. But one day in December when I come home from work, I find a blue envelope slipped under my door. It is a letter from Denis and he tells me that he thinks of me when he is thinking of other people. That everybody is compared to me. He signs it With lots of love, Denis xxx.
•
The night my father gave my mother the French perfume, Je Reviens, he took her to a Russian opera, Boris Godunov, at the Met. In the near darkness of the theater, the soft floral scent, which she’d dabbed on her throat and behind her ears, drifted sweetly between them.
•
I lie in bed in my room on Marguerite Road and close my eyes.
Pacing barefoot along a rocky ledge I wait for Denis in the late afternoon, the wind at my hair and my long, rough skirt. I look down a sweeping precipice at the tumultuous sea.
As the inland sky turns slightly purple with the descending sun, I see him coming from a path along the hill. We smile shyly at each other, then go into the cottage where we live together, and eat before the fire. Afterward, when my anticipation has reached too high a pitch, he blows out the flame in the paraffin lamp. We take off our clothes and lie facing each other, the whitewashed walls twitching softly with shadows, his face, chest, and arms lit by the glow of the waning fire.
•
Mom hangs wind chimes on the back porch. I love the melodiousness, but in states of half sleep, the chiming sounds agitated to me, music that is trying but cannot quite form.
•
I buy Christmas gifts to send back to New Mexico. Scarves for Tracy and Sheila made of fine Aran wool, a pink one and a purple one. For Jerry and Karen, a plaque for their kitchen that says: Half a bap with sugar on the top.
•
Just after Christmas, Letty invites me to move into an empty room in the big third-floor flat she rents on Lower Baggot Street. I jump at the chance. I’ll be in the center of the city, only blocks away from Dobbins and the Focus Theatre. And I’ll pay less in rent.
Letty’s building is an old gray brick Georgian, four floors high, connected to a long line of similar buildings that runs the length of Lower Baggot Street. The staircases are wide, and the flat unheated, like most everywhere else in Ireland. The ceilings are very high, and stratospheres of cold hover over each room. The whole flat seems to lean, the floors and walls uneven, slightly aslant. Letty calls it “the ship on Baggot Straits.”
“It’s on the verge of collapse,” she says with a smile the first time I come over.
“Then I know I belong here,” I say and we laugh.
I write to Denis with the new address. He has not answered my last letter. I ask him again to please come to Dublin.
The room I move into is the brightest and coldest in the flat. The fittings on the enormous window that overlooks Baggot Street are ancient, so any blasts of wind racing past come in through the corners. The old, lumpy bed, which is actually a collapsed couch that Letty acquired years before “for a song,” as she puts it, is a sad, worn-out thing. One side of it slopes downward, and in order not to fall off, I have to positio
n myself in a certain dip carved out for me by the previous owner, whom I try, as I lie there, not to imagine.
•
Letty’s own single bed serves also as a couch in the main room, which faces the back of the building, bare winter trees visible just outside the window. There is a kitchen area in this same room, the walls painted black. “So you don’t see the dirt,” Letty says, smiling.
Between the two rooms Letty’s big, messy studio is crowded with various tables and armatures, sacks of plaster and buckets of wet clay under big, cloudy sheets of plastic. Dried clay streaks the walls.
Every night while living here I drink warm milk and honey and take a hot water bottle in with me to bed, where I cover myself not only with every old blanket Letty has in there but also with my clothes and my coat, and sometimes some of the canvas tarps used to cover sculptures.
In the morning Letty fires up the paraffin heater in her room, and we huddle around it, drinking instant coffee. There is no refrigerator, so she keeps a bottle of milk in a bowl of cold water. Now and then we go up Leeson Street and buy a bucket of coal, lug it back together, then light a coal fire in the grate.
•
In Tracy and Sheila’s apartment in Albuquerque, the three of us drink beer and listen to the radio. We are a little tipsy when “Going to California” comes on.
We put our arms around each other and sing along:
Someone told me there’s a girl out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.
When the mandolin begins to play sweetly, Sheila smiles. The edges of Tracy’s face grow indistinct. Her eyes shine.
•
To make extra money I model for Letty, and for a month or so, a supine, nude, clay figure of me, which Letty is constantly wetting with splashes of water, inhabits a table in the studio.
After hours of sculpting and modeling, we walk through the park at Fitzwilliam Square, and sometimes end up at the National Gallery, looking at the Rodin sculptures, walking around them in breathless silence. I love The Burghers of Calais, massive distended figures concentrated with emotion, gesturing with gnarled, oversized hands. Or we go to Doheny and Nesbitt’s, a pub across Baggot Street, and drink two or three Irish coffees.
Ghost Songs Page 18
